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BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



I. -Esthetics ; or, The Science of Beauty. 8vg, cloth. . . . 

II. Ethics; or, The Science of Duty. 8vo, cloth ... 1.75 

III. Natural Theology. 8vo, cloth 1.50^ 

IV. The Science of Mind. Svo, cloth 2.00 

V. The Philosophy of English Literature. Lectures deliv 

ered before the Lowell Institute, Boston. Svo, cloth .... 1.50 
VI. The Growth and Grades of Intelligence ; or, Co3i- 

PARATivE Psychology. Svo, cloth. . 1.50 

VII. A Philosophy of Religion ; or, the Rational Grounds 

of Religious Belief. Svo, cloth 2.00 

VIII. Philosophy of Rhetoric. Svo, cloth 1.25 

IX. The Words of Christ. Svo, cloth 1.50 

X. Problems in Philosophy. Svo, cloth 1.50 

XI. Sociology. Svo, cloth 1.50 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York and London. 



THE NEW THEOLOGY 



JOHN BASCOM 



AUTHOR OF 'a philosophy OF RELIGION; OR, THE RATIONAL GROUNDS 

OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF," ''*' THE WORDS OF CHRIST AS 

PRINCIPLES OF PERSONAL AND SOCIAL 

GROWTH," ETC., ETC. 




c- 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK LONDON 

a/ WEST TWENTY-THIRD ST. 27 KING WILLIAM ST., STRAND 

%\z l^nickerbochcr Jress 



1891 



^\ 






1^'^ 



Copyright, 1891 

BY 

JOHN BASCOM 



Tbe Iknicftcrbocftct ipress, IRew J^orft 

Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by 
G. p. Putnam's Sons 




THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED TO 

EDWARD ORTON, 

WHOM I FIRST LEARNED TO LOVE ON ANDOVER HILL 

— A POINT OF REVOLUTION AND DEPARTURE 

FOR US BOTH 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface .......... vii 

Introduction . i 

I. — Naturalism ii 

II. — The Supernatural ...... 73 

III. — Dogmatism . - 113 

IV. — Pietism 157 

V. — Spiritualism 188 



PREFACE. 

This work is equally removed in its conclusions from 
the opinions of those who think that, in the deeper ques- 
[tions of being, we can know nothing, and waste our time 
by inquiry; and the opinions of those who suppose that 
I we are already sufficiently instructed in these directions 
[by revelation, and have only to hold fast its truths. It 
proceeds on the supposition that there is truth of infinite 
moment attainable by man both from nature and from 
revelation, both from the constitution of the world and 
from the aggregate of human experience under it, but 
that this truth is of such breadth and magnitude that our 
measurements are all necessarily partial and ephemeral. 
A range of mountains is none the less visible, none the 
less inspiring, because we can see but a small portion of it 
from any one point, and because even this portion changes 
rapidly with a shifting of position or a transfer of light. 
It is this mobility of a vision that makes it divine. 

Great things are, in the measure of their greatness, 
incomprehensible, yet our knowledge of them is of more 
worth than all other knowledge, is as truly knowledge as 
our knowing of the most minute and sensuous things. 
We see by the light of a sun not one millionth part 
of whose rays ever enter the eye ; we behold, in the 
spiritual world, by the light of truths which transcend our 
perception of them like the depths of infinity. Yet it is 
this very fact that distinguishes man from all the creatures 



viii PREFACE. 

near him. While he stands on great heights, he is intel- 
lectually filled with things far beyond his vision. He 
flings his life forward, and wins it again in the empty 
spaces of thought. He casts his bread on the waters, and 
gathers it after many days. He that saves his life by a 
prudent economy of inquiry loses it, and he that loses 
his life in the boldness of well-timed faith saves it ; no- 
where is a whole-souled venture more applicable than in the 
higher ranges of thought. We submit ourselves to nature, 
we submit ourselves to revelation ; we are restrained here, 
and helped there ; now sobered, and now quickened in 
inquiry, but all in obedience to the ends of life. This is 
the spirit of the work here offered ; a trust in the powers 
of the mind — in many ways aided and corrected — labori- 
ously, patiently, vigorously, to fulfil all the ends of 
thought. To ask a question, is to have a clue to the 
answer. We make no further apology for returning again 
to difficult discussions. 



THE NEW THEOLOGY 



INTRODUCTION. 

That which is designated as the New Theology is, on 
the constructive side, the most general and conspicuous 
religious fact of our time, and by far the most significant 
one. What I have to say aims at a better understanding 
of this fact, in itself, in the forces which give rise to it, and 
in its practical results. 

The New Theology is after all not a theology. There 
is no creed that we can call the new creed ; there is no 
conclusion or series of conclusions that occupies, in this 
movement, any more a final position than do other 
allied convictions. The New Theology is not a creed but 
a tendency ; is not a result but a movement. All men 
may feel it and share it, — most cultivated men do share 
it, — no man can make it his own or sufficiently voice it. 
Indeed it consists largely in breaking old bonds and in 
refusing to accept new ones. It is a ferment in the reli- 
gious mind, an excitement in the religious camp, of which 
many marches are already the result, from which many 
more are to come. Some of these marches have carried 
those who have taken part in them quite beyond the 
lines of safety, and, as we think at least, over the un- 
certain borders which separate belief and unbelief. Such 
marching, because it is bold, even to recklessness, and is 

I 



2 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

yet the result of the new inspiration, is not, therefore, its 
most complete or most just expression. Some have hardly 
left the camp, and only slightly shifted their quarters in 
it, yet this restlessness has the same cause and the same 
significance as the rashness of their fellows. The New 
Theology is to be judged by that which is sound, safe, 
and moderate in it, and not by its excesses or its insuffi- 
ciencies. 

The New Theology stands for an awakening in religious 
thought which leads it to seek for more flexible, less 
rigid ; more productive, less barren ; more living, less dead 
forms of expression and action, and by means of them to 
come fully under the progressive movement which belongs 
to our time as one of enlarged knowledge and renewed 
social life. One of the most conservative forms of 
thought is the religious form. But that conservatism 
has been sensibly reduced in many directions, and that 
fact is the fact of the New Theology, — the greatest fact 
in the history of the period because it expresses the 
utmost power and stretch of the tendencies that are 
securing change, that are pushing men onward, and bring- 
ing forward the Kingdom of Heaven. 

The point of greatest interest in this movement is not 
what leading minds now think, but what directions, what 
degrees, what rapidity, of progress are to be occasioned by 
the pulsation of faith in the religious mind as a whole. 
Our only test of these later results is what we ourselves 
regard as the most guarded conclusions of the soundest 
thinkers of to-day, but we may be well assured that 
humanity, in traversing more slowly the same wilderness 
of thought, will not pitch its tents in exactly the same 
positions we have chosen, nor tarry in them merely be- 
cause we have found it convenient to rest there. 



INTRODUCTION. 3 

The real question in society, in religion, even in phi- 
losophy, is the question of the masses. As the glacier, 
by its immense weight and untiring pressure in all direc- 
tions, seeks out, and furrows out, through every zig-zag, 
the lowest lines of advance, so the popular mind, by the 
slowness, the multiplicity, the universality of its impres- 
sions, successfully unites the very facts of life with the 
very ideas which give them the safest and most compre- 
hensive solution. If the movement is exceedingly slow, 
it is far less erratic than that of the more gifted. While 
much is due to rapidity, much is also due to inertia, in 
intellectual soundness ; and we are interested in the New 
Theology not merely on account of the sudden accelera- 
tions of thought which overtake the minds of intellectual 
men by means of it, but because of the retardations and 
corrections and final resolutions it is suffering, and is to 
suffer, under popular sentiment. This sentiment as often 
expends itself indirectly, in social problems, as directly, in 
religious speculation. It brings to the solution of the 
theories of life the forces of life, and gives them that 
final, concrete exposition from which there is no escape. 
The social eagerness of the many is akin to the specula- 
tive interest of the few, and later results will combine 
them both. 

We understand, then, by the New Theology a move- 
ment — one that is to be measured by masses, and often 
to be watched with most care at points at which it is the 
slowest. It is the essence of this movement that there is 
really nothing new in it, nothing final ; that its features of 
interest, as in all progress, are direction, volume, rapidity, 
and that it has just now received a new name, because the 
slope of thought has made all these factors, for the mo- 
ment, conspicuous. 



4 ' THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

The most obvious occasion for this accelerated move- 
ment in theology has been the progress of knowledge in 
other directions, more especially in science. This advance 
of knowledge has forced a reconstruction of the religious 
idea of the origin of the world, of the order and depend- 
ence of physical events, of the time occupied by them, 
and of the part they play in development. This revision 
of thought would have carried with it no great difficulty 
had not the dogmatic temper previously brought to these 
outlying questions a certainty and authority that do not 
belong to them. The fortune of central spiritual truths 
had come, in men's minds, to be identified with that of 
the remote conceptions associated with them, and so such 
a topic as that of the creation of the world raised the 
entire question of the adequacy and authority of religious 
instruction. The infallible is cut off from correction. 
Readjustment is impossible, and so great riffs, deep faults, 
began to appear in faith. 

Science has also altered our conception of the govern- 
ment of God, and so somewhat of his character; the 
natural has gained immensely on the supernatural. A new 
statement of both of these forms of action is called for, 
and of their relation to each ofher. The confusion and 
the difficulty of thought at this point have been very 
great, and neither science, nor philosophy, nor religion, 
has been able to give us any generally accepted solution. 
Science, as interested in naturalism, and religion, as iden- 
tified with supernaturalism, have inevitably slipped into 
conflict ; the conflict which is incident to diverse and par- 
tial views, whose lines of reconciliation and union have 
not been found. 

Just here a most thorough reconstruction of thought is 
called for — one that shall reach equally our physical and 



INTRODUCTION. 5 

moral conceptions, our practical and spiritual experiences. 
Science has frequently fallen into a dogmatism at this 
point which has served to relieve the dogmatism of reli- 
gion, and to make the contest between them somewhat 
more equal. Absolute naturalism in science is as unten- 
able as easy-going supernaturalism in faith. The general 
mind will accept the latter as readily as the former, and is 
waiting for a philosophy that will accord as full a recogni- 
tion to the laws of mind as to those of matter. Or rather 
it possesses latent within itself such a philosophy, and is 
looking for its more full exposition, defence, and accept- 
ance. Nor does a positive assertion of agnosticism help 
the position of science. The human mind will not suffer 
itself to be curbed in pushing inquiries, which profoundly 
interest it, without an altogether sufficient reason. The 
giving of the reason opens anew the entire discussion. 

An occasion for a profound movement in religious 
thought has been found in the inevitable extension of 
naturalism, incident to the progress of science, an exten- 
sion almost as direct in its effects on religious ideas and 
methods of work as on invention and labor. 

Science has also brought with it new methods of proof, 
has altered the relation between deduction and induction, 
and has led us to seek and to demand in all statements 
which touch facts, even remotely, the confirmation of ex- 
perience. The facile ways of deduction are much nar- 
rowed, and many of the conclusions which have been 
made to rest upon them are received with incredulity. 
The exact conclusions concerning the subjective con- 
stitution of God, known as the doctrine of the Trinity, 
arising largely from verbal analysis, seem little better than 
moonshine, when contrasted with the faithful, flexible 
conceptions of science, won in the very presence of the 



6 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

facts to which they pertain. Hence there is present to us 
a new estimate of proof, and of the proper subjects of in- 
quiry, and this brings with it a decisive change for the 
dogmatic and theological temper. In this movement 
there is some excess, unwarrantable depreciations, and un- 
reasonable exaltations, of method, but, as a very profound 
and valid step of progress, it touches religious thought in 
many ways, and brings to it correction on many sides. 
The nature of dogmatism, and the limits of religious dis- 
cussion, are thrown upon the mind for fresh consideration. 

A still more important regenerative force has been 
found, in this passage from the old to the new, in ethical 
inquiry. The law of conduct in individual and social 
development, in national life, and in the historic progress 
of the race, is the latest and fullest fruit of knowledge. 
The ethical law, in its authority, and in the multiplicity 
of its applications, must ever grow in the minds of 
men. This law, demanding so much investigation, ever 
taking to itself new and higher services by virtue of the 
services already rendered, ever leading to more perfect 
insight by the insight already achieved — this law, shaping 
itself into fresh forms of the divine grace, demands con- 
stant reconciliation with religion, and a constant reconcili- 
ation of religious truth with it. The divine character, 
the fundamental principles of faith, find the record of facts 
in which, and by which, they are brought near to us, in 
the moral discipline and growth of the world ; and the 
harmonizing of our religious conceptions with the facts to 
which they pertain in society must forever go forward by 
means of this inquiry into the laws of conduct. 

Religious action that does not perpetually reshape itself 
to these laws of conduct, growing up under the increased 
insight and widest experience of men, becomes religiosity, 



n 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

checking the freedom of thought, and barring out the 
Kingdom of Heaven. The purity and power of faith at 
any one period or place must depend on its harmony with 
the forces of ethical construction there present. While 
religion corrects morality, morality equally corrects reli- 
gion, and the two interlace each other as the form and 
force of the same thing. Indeed, if we accept the fact of 
the divine being and character as established, morality 
covers the laws of conduct which grow out of this fact, 
taken in connection with our own constitution, the consti- 
tution of society, and of the world to which we belong- 
Between sound religion and safe morals there is no dis- 
tinction of subject-matter. They are both the interpreta- 
tion of the same set of facts. The only way in which 
there springs up a difference between them is hy a limita- 
tion of the facts accepted, or by a divided method of 
growth under them. If we deny the being of God', we 
destroy religion, but only weaken morality. Ethics- takes 
its start in the character of man and his immediate social 
relations, and from this centre, under the growth of expe- 
rience, lays down the laws of conduct. Religion. starts 
with the character of God and the convictions of faith sup- 
ported by revelation, and from this point of light declares 
the nature of righteousness and the rules of behavior. 
The results, in either case, should be the same. Our base 
lines lie in the same 'field, and our surveys should meet in 
identical measurements. No moral deductions from the 
character of God as to the government of the world 
should contradict the careful inductions of experience, 
gathered under that very government itself. Indeed, 
these two processes of thought are present for the very 
purpose of mutual correction, and any conflict between 
them implies error in one or in both. 



8 ' THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

Our piety must be morally sound and productive, and 
have the practical wisdom and extension of experience ; 
and our morality must have the vigor of piety and its 
undying inspiration, if the two are to be constituents of 
sober character, outer and inner phases of a divine life. 
The love which is of God must express itself in a wide 
and wise culture, which nourishes human powers and 
affections through the entire field of individual and social 
growth. 

There is a scepticism of unsatisfied feeling in our time 
that we have most of all to fear. It is a scepticism taking 
possession of the working classes, because they do not 
find the heart of Christ in the church of Christ. Social- 
ism, in its inner force, is a mistaken sea:rch for a social 
construction which shall fulfil the second commandment, 
at least on its for'mal side. The masses crave the unity 
and strength which belong to the Christian idea ; and if 
they turn from that idea, as expressed in the faith of our 
day, it is because the truth is not offered to them in a 
form in which they recognize it. We fall off from the 
wisdom of God in our dogmatic statements, and so pro- 
voke a scepticism of thought ; we miss the love of Christ in 
social construction, and so call forth a wider, more dan- 
gerous, more revolutionary scepticism of the affections. It 
is in our hearts that- we affirm there is or there is not a 
God. A sound moral sense, sustaining itself with the 
force and tenderness of the religious emotions, would win 
men back, in full ranks, to the Kingdom of Heaven. 
Our social problems are most urgently and directly the 
problems of faith. 

The movement which we designate as the New Theol- 
ogy owes much of its vigor to a renewed effort to unite 
the pietism of religion and the virtue of morality to a 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

higher, wider, deeper spiritualism, which shall have the 
mastery of ideas in their practical development, and by 
this practical development shall rise continually into purer 
and more just conceptions of them. This union of the 
present with the future, the life that now is with the life 
that ought to be ; this meeting God in the works of God ; 
this making revelation the light 'that lighteth every man 
that Cometh into the world, are the substance of the New 
Theology ; new only in casting aside the mischievous 
limitations of faith, and giving it free play once more in 
the work of interpretation, correction, and inspiration 
which falls to it. Faith that was ceasing to grow is 
planted in fresh soil, and becomes again the tree of life, 
bearing twelve manner of fruits, ana yielding its fruit 
every month ; while its leaves are for the healing of the 
nations. 

The present volume proposes five topics of consideration, 
which closely concern the New Theology : Naturalism, 
Supernaturalism, Dogmatism, Pietism, and Spiritualism. 
The discussion will involve a partial reconsideration of 
topics before discussed by me, but the importance of the 
topics, their modified presentation and new relations, will 
justify this demand for fresh attention to them. While 
these topics of thought in their final statement are the 
most difficult that come before us, they return to us as 
no other topics do, and affect the inner flow of thought 
and outward form of action with a vigor all their own. 
As long as life is more than meat, will men consider, and 
be wise in considering, these themes which bring rest to 
the mind within itself, and lay down lines of thought and 
laws of conduct that stretch to the spiritual horizon. The 
mind raises questions for the very end of answering them, 
and though the answers may be long in coming, the in- 



lO THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

quiries themselves imply the movements of thought which 
are finally to bring them. 

An agnosticism that raises doubts, and then professes 
an absolute inability to solve them, overlooks the fact, at 
least in part, that the push and pertinacity of inquiry 
arise from the clues that are leading to its resolution. We 
would stand by all that is given to knowledge and sound 
faith, both in matter and in mind, and put once more the 
same questions that men have put from the beginning, 
believing that while no answer is absolute, each succeed- 
ing answer may be more exact, more complete, than any 
preceding one. We may well remember that we are, 
where all men should love to be, at the dawn of reasono 
Though the day seems to break slowly into light, our im- 
patience is the impatience of children who take slight 
measure of the events and processes about them. If we 
were to have more, we should in truth have less, having a 
weaker hold on the inner force of facts, dropping into a 
sensuous measure of things and out of the spiritual range 
of ideas. 



CHAPTER I. 

NATURALISM. 

We understand by naturalism the universal presence of 
laws in the world, and their coherence in a complete sys- 
tem. We do not, however, understand by it one form of 
law, to the exclusion of other forms ; but the union of 
different forms in one harmonious whole. Naturalism 
includes, therefore, not simply physical laws, but intellec- 
tual laws and moral laws as well ; the laws of matter, of 
thought, and of conduct. It embraces not simply forces, 
but reasons and motives. It has to do not only with the 
coherence of causes and effects, but also with the connec- 
tion of premises and conclusions, and the union of feel- 
ings and actions in volition. If we insist on naturalism 
under the single form of physical law, we shall soon, if we 
are coherent in our thinking, involve the spiritual world 
in a deadlock that cannot be overcome. 

The world has unity, not identity, of method ; coher- 
ence, not sameness, of parts. Naturalism means this 
unity and coherence, and because of it the system of 
things is wholly fitted to the reason of man. The element 
of reason in it is not fragmentary and sporadic, but con- 
current and pervasive. To say this is only another way 
of asserting naturalism. The prevalence and power of 
reason in the world, by which it becomes the school of 
reason to man, constitutes its naturalism — the systematic 



12 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

presence of method. This naturaHsm is an essential con-. 
dition to inquiry and to control, to knowledge and to 
conduct. Action which is not mechanical, nor organic, 
nor instinctive, but, higher than these, rational, must have 
a rational basis of procedure, and this basis is law. When 
law ceases, reason ceases ; and action ceases as the expres- 
sion of thought. All moral discipline must come to an 
end along those lines which divide order and confusion, 
an action of method and methodless action. 

This truth of naturalism, though always present more 
or less to men's thoughts, is the one emphatic lesson of 
science ; a lesson which has unspeakably enriched the 
human mind, increased its powers, and enlarged its 
responsibilities. In the enforcement of naturalism, science 
has found itself in conflict with religion, because religion 
has cherished many expectations, and adopted many 
methods, not well grounded in law ; has conceived and 
entertained a supernatural more or less in conflict with the 
natural, and has thereby lost the secure footing of obe- 
dience to law, an obedience science never wearies of 
enforcing. Here is a discrepancy in our two methods of 
thought of utmost moment, and one to be overcome only 
by a thorough reconsideration of the religious notion of 
supernaturalism, on the one side, and a wise extension of 
the scientific idea of naturalism, on the other. Our first 
step toward this enlargement and harmony of thought is 
a reinforcement of the completeness and coherence of the 
divine method, a reassertion of naturalism as the basis of 
spiritual life equally with physical life. While naturalism 
must be redefined, it is a fatal mistake to carry our re- 
ligious experience away from it. This is a leading occa- 
sion of the New Theology, and its primary result is the 
extended recognition of a comprehensive naturalism, cov- 



NATURALISM. 1 3 

ering both the physical and the spiritual, and rendering 
them a suitable field for the coherent, rational develop- 
ment of the powers of man. God and man thus meet, in 
one continuous, progressive, and prosperous movement. 
The divisions of the universe, if not healed, are being healed, 
by the grace of God, We are coming to understand all 
things as organic parts of one process — redemption. 

In one direction, especially, — both because the inquiry 
IS initiatory, and is a favorable example of method — we 
wish fully to enforce the strictly natural terms of faith, 
that of inspiration. We must know, to begin with, on 
what terms the mind deals with religious truths. The 
prevalent notion of inspiration, so far as it implies a super- 
natural and final authority in Revelation, takes the truths 
of Revelation from under the ordinary laws of thought, 
and enforces them upon the mind in a manner alien to the 
development of reason. So far as religious truth rests on 
authority, it ceases to rest on reason, ceases to be a dis- 
cipline to reason, ceases to be subject to its laws. Reason 
may, and often must, accept much on authority, which it 
does not, for the time being, understand. This is no sus- 
pension of reason. Its earlier action is found in testing 
the sufficiency of the authority, and its later action in 
testing, at its leisure, the correctness of the assertions 
made under that authority. At neither point can reason 
be straitened without pushing the mind from its proper 
basis The inquiry into the rightfulness of authority 
must usually precede the inquiry into the truth which the 
authority supports ; but it can never suspend that inquiry 
when the proper time for it comes. The one act only 
prepares the way for the other. The length of time that 
may lapse between them is a matter of the mind^s growth 
and of convenience. 



14 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

The doctrine of inspiration, so far as it creates an 
authority external to the mind itself, and makes that 
authority final, slips from the basis of naturalism, and, 
at the very threshold of theology, separates religious 
truth from all other forms of truth, takes it from under 
the laws of mind to which it is addressed, and enforces 
it in a supernatural way. This method we believe to be 
profoundly unreasonable, since it arises in partial suspen- 
sion of reason in its highest function ; this method we 
believe to be profoundly unwise, since it tends to pre- 
vent the free, hearty, and sufficient exploration of this 
highest field of thought, thus enclosed by the quickset 
hedge of authority. The continuity of the intellectual 
and spiritual world is thus broken up, and we have a 
dividing line beyond which the powers of mind are in 
suspension. Of course, this suspension, so obviously in- 
admissible in itself, is enforced with many evasions and 
concessions ; it should not be enforced at all. Every 
measure of arrest is a loss to the mind of its proper activ- 
ity, and that, too, in the best and holiest direction. We 
may well pluck off our sandals when we tread holy places, 
but to tread them is the divine gift. 

The works and words of God are not divided in their 
relation to mind. If the works of God can bear all the 
limitations, delays, and failures of reason, so can his 
words. If the works of God yield the largest service to 
man in calling forth inquiry and in responding to it, so 
do his words. If the works of God, direct from the hand 
of God, may still bear human handling, so may his words, 
which come to us through the mutable minds of men. 

What is now to be said will be regarded by some as an 
attack on inspiration, and so an attack on religion. It is 
not an attack on inspiration, except as inspiration is 



NATURALISM. 1 5 

enforced in suspension of the laws of the mind ; nor on 
religion, except as religion is fenced about by a super- 
naturalism Avhich disguises its true character. Religion 
rests on a divine method which penetrates the world 
from centre to circumference, a method which is the 
fulness of the divine thought. In this form w^e wish to 
possess it and defend it, and, therefore, we are willing to 
break down those barriers of authority, which, like the 
uncalled-for defences of a camp, take from us the true 
field of conflict. 

. We wi^h to see the Scriptures reposing on their own 
basis, the only sufificient and secure basis, of intrinsic 
truth ; we wish to see them fully restored to all the uses — 
even abuses, if you please — of mind ; we wish to acknowl- 
- edge and possess an inspiration which consists in the 
soul's, mastery of its owm medium of life, its inbreathing 
of its- own native air, the spiritual presence and love of 
God. There is a naturalism by which the physical world 
holds the Avisdom of God like a saturated solution ; by 
which the laws of thought are seen to have everywhere 
constructive mastery; by which the affections of the 
mind are offered to us as the last, highest, fullest product 
of growth — this naturalism, the way of God, and the way 
to God ; this naturalism, the path of light that threads 
the creation from the beginning, passing ever more and 
more into perfect day, we are in search of, and must be 
allowed, no matter how dizzy the height or perilous the 
way, to pursue in humble, faithful exploration, helped, in 
spite of all apparent difficulties, by every inspired agent 
and servant of God. 

In an attempt to establish naturalism as the only 
secure foundation of religious life, the methods of re« 
ligious truth must first be settled. We must know, at 



l6 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

the very outset, to what laws of inquiry we are commit- 
ted, or whether to any laws ; whether in the highest form 
of search into truth, the work is to be done for us, or 
whether we are to be trusted to it and it to us with that 
hesitancy, feebleness, and obscurity which fall to our 
powers ; whether the power is helped or we are helped in 
the use of the power ; whether truth is eternally truth in 
living action under its own laws, or whether it is capable 
of an unconscious transfer, and can be made to play an 
obscure, yet vital, part in a mind that is not mastering it. 

We can meet with no great success in religious inquiry 
till we correctly understand our sources of knowledge and 
their right method of use. Evidently the existence, char- 
acter, and government of God are to be established, if 
established at all, in connection with the constitution of 
the world, and pre-eminently in connection with its 
spiritual constitution. If these outer and inner facts of 
being do not contain and confirm our religious theory, 
that theory is void, for it is ultimately a theory of these 
very things. The world, then, in its physical, intellectual, 
social, and spiritual features offers the fundamental facts 
which we have occasion, in religious thought, to under- 
stand and expound. 

A more familiar source, and, to most minds a more 
direct source, of religious truths is the Scriptures, what 
we term Revelation. It is of the utmost moment that 
we apprehend correctly the relation of Revelation to our 
empirical inquiries into the constitution of man and of 
society. These last are necessarily changeable and grow- 
ing terms with us, and our new knowledge from these and 
kindred sources must either bring fresh interpretation to 
Revelation, or increasingly collide with it. The freedom, 
form, and force of our investigation in the field of actual 



NATURALISM. 1/ 

life — spiritual life as we know it — will turn very much on 
our notion of the nature of this controlling term in re- 
ligious thought, Revelation. Our view of it may be such 
as greatly to narrow inquiry, or such as greatly to enlarge 
it ; such as to perplex its processes, or such as to ac- 
celerate them. 

The character of Revelation is discussed as the doctrine 
of inspiration. Nothing, in our religious methods, will 
be more controlling than our conception of this doctrine. 
There are much vagueness and diversity of opinion on the 
topic, and yet there is a very general concurrence, in 
Christian churches, in the belief that inspiration stands, 
in some very peculiar way, for a divine word w^hich is 
sufficient and final in religious thought ; that Revelation 
takes the things disclosed by it out of the category of 
truths to be constantly investigated and forever restated, 
and puts them in that of truths to be apprehended and 
accepted once for all. The doctrine of inspiration thus 
goes far to determine the nature and limits of inquiry in 
the religious world. An authoritative rule of faith and 
practice is something very different from an open and 
changeable field of investigation. 

No degree of labor, therefore, is lost which is directed, 
at the very outset, to this dependence on each other of 
natural and revealed religion, of the truths we are still 
reaching and those we have already reached. If these 
are so far removed from each other as to have different 
sources of authority, and to make different appeals to the 
human mind, we must have that fact constantly in view, 
and, even then, much perplexity will arise from it. This 
feeling of diversity is the more common religious experi- 
ence, and gives occasion to a very conservative and dog- 
matic temper, and one distrustful of inquiry in the actual 



1 8 TPIE NEW THEOLOGY. 

world. The office of religion is felt to be rather the crea- 
tion of a new world, than the development of the world 

v^ that now is. 

' ''^ We believe, and wish to show, that the two forms of 
truth are one and the same, rest on identical grounds, 
and must be unfolded concurrently. We wish to aid in 
opening all paths of thought. Inspiration is the mind's 
mastery of truth, — nothing less than this and there is 
nothing greater than this — and this mastery is in no 
person, at no period, and in no important particular, com- 
plete. The rational criteria of knowledge are uniform, 
throughout the realm of thought, no matter how purely 
spiritual that thought may be. 

A doctrine of inspiration that affirms the divine author- 
ity of any principle, aside from the insight of the mind of 
the recipient, involves an inadmissible idea, is without 
sufficient proof, fails to perform the very service expected 
of it, and interferes, at every stage, with the just develop- 
ment of religious truth. 

The idea is untenable in the degree in which we strive 
to give it distinctness. There are three kinds of truths in 
the Bible : those which contain fundamental principles in 
the divine government and in human conduct, those 
which utter the feelings of the writers in their own per- 
sonal experience, and those which are simple statements 
of facts. It is in connection with the first form of truth, 
the truth of principles, that the doctrine of inspiration is 
of most moment. Some are ready to confine it to these 
spiritual truths, and yet, after all, it is least applicable to 
them. Insight alone gives us the mastery of the truth, 
and makes it truly valuable. In the measure in which 
principles are understood are they possessed, and in the 
measure in which they are obscure are they lost, by us. 



NATURALISM. I9 

Truths cannot be used successfully as mere rules of 
thumb in action. When we miss comprehension, we miss 
the point of light, the point of power. If, then, the last 
and highest phase of exaltation in religious truth trans- 
cends insight, we are putting darkness in place of light 
where light is most precious. We object to any view of 
inspiration which precludes error by overstepping the 
human mind, because it breaks down the inner organic 
force of thought in the very act in which God most 
strengthens it. It humbles us inexplicably, where God 
exalts us unspeakably. No life can come out of a process 
which itself lacks life, and least of all in the spiritual 
world. The soul never so lives, as when it lives before 
God in the light of his truth. 

We must accept the freedom and force of the mind in 
grasping the truth, otherwise the truth is not grasped. 
The power of understanding the truth is of so critical 
and profound an order that it must be allo*wed to com- 
plete itself according to its own nature. Nor can we 
properly say that any comprehension of truth by a sacred 
writer is due to a foreign impulse. The normal as op- 
posed to the abnormal, the natural as contrasted with the 
divine, is defined by the very fact that the percipient 
mind does, by its own free movement, enter into the truth 
as truth, and that to the very limit of its comprehension of 
it. It would not be more unphilosophical to say that the 
prophet, in a portion of his physical functions, lives by a 
miracle, than to say that he in part thinks by a miracle. 
Thought as thought is, in all its degrees, natural; as 
human thought, it is limited in all its degrees, and, in all 
its degrees, is open to variety, partiality, error. It can 
retain its constitution on no other terms. We have no 
occasion for two causes of one thing, and the one cause 



20 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

of human thought is the human mind, aided in many 
ways, but in no way overpowered, by the divine mind. 

The advocates of an inspiration that fills human speech, | 
as a dry conduit of words, with the living flow of divine j 
thought, do not seem to have sufficiently considered the : 
incompatibility of the two terms they are handling. In- '< 
congruous things are united by them in impossible ways, j 
Language and idea can only coalesce as a living process of 
thought. This union must take place either in the human 
mind or in the divine mind ; or the two must unite in and 
by the truth. The truth is the only point of spiritual con- 
tact. To put any strain upon our faculties beyond their 
own normal activity is so far to confound them ; is to turn 
vision into illusion by pressure upon the eyeball. Noth- 
ing is more removed from all knowledge than words which 
have lost their interpretation within the mind itself. They 
are stones without cement — that leak at once the living 
waters that are entrusted to them. That which is under- 
stood affiliates with itself throughout under the action of 
the comprehending mind ; it has no affiliation with that 
which is not understood. 

Even in prophetic vision, it is something seen and felt, 
and so far understood, that is spread before the eye. The 
prophetic mind is prophetic because it catches the gleam 
of the winding river. The light of God's presence is on 
the years before it as on the years behind it. An inspira- 
tion that should exceed insight, and yet claim to be of the 
nature of truth, would be as unintelligible as if no human 
mind intervened, as if we saw unknown words suddenly 
appear upon the wall. We should have instant recourse to 
a teacher who could read and understand for us the in- 
scription. It is astonishing, to the verge of foolishness, 
the way in which we speak of the truth, and bow to it, 



li 



NATURALISM. 21 

and salute it, as if it were an external reality, and not only 
and forever an inner, spiritual presence, born of our own 
thoughts. We are willing to turn the high-priest of truth 
into the keeper of a fetich, as if he were more to us thus 
than as ministering to the life of the soul within the soul 
itself — leaving us to make what way we can with the 
divine message. 

There is no inspiration except in truth, and no truth 
except in the vision of the mind. Words do not contain 
it, but only words that are comprehended. That would 
be a strange revelation which revealed nothing, but the 
truth is revealed only as the mind is in living interplay 
with the vehicle of expression. We might as well regard 
I light as disclosure independent of the eye, as to conceive 
! the light of God's spiritual kingdom as a certain something 
transmissible without vision. 

This brings us to another difficulty. If religious truth 
' is given in an inspiration that transcends the powers of 
: mind it should be, nay it must be, transmitted from person 
to person in a like way ! How can the pupil perceive what 
the teacher could not conceive ! How can we rise to truth 
I the apostles could not win ! In its daily uses the truth 
must settle at once to the level of the minds of those who 
; have to do with it. Speaker and listener must stand on 
! the same spiritual basis. In the degree in which truth 
I rises above the moral level in which it is employed it is 
' useless : it is no longer truth for any purpose of those in- 
j terested in it. The spaces between the powers which can 
i understand a principle, when it is stated, and the powers 
I which can grasp that principle, in the facts which contain 
I it, are only human spaces — spaces traversable by human 
^ thought. If we separate the mind of the teacher from the 
i lesson he is to communicate by a stretch too great for 



22 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

his comprehension, he must necessarily cease to be a 
teacher. We acquire truth by coming in contact with a 
mind that has mastered it. If, therefore, in our theory of 
Revelation we put between the first message and the re- 
ceiver of it an interval too great for the human mind, we 
have done either a mischievous thing or an unnecessary 
thing : unnecessary, if we are each of us to master the 
Revelation all the same ; most mischievous, if we are cut 
off from this mastery. 

In the last analysis, what the doctrinaire affirms by 
inspiration is the inspiration of his own mind. No other 
inspiration can help him. His own mind is the sole 
medium of truth ; as his own eye is of vision. The doc- 
trine he affirms to be unmistakable is his own conception 
of that doctrine. When Calhoun claimed the right of 
the citizens of South Carolina to carry their property, to 
wit, slaves, into the territories with the same freedom with 
which the citizens of Massachusetts carried their property, 
to wit, household goods, into them, Webster responded : 
'^ We hold our property under common law ; you hold your 
property under the local law of South Carolina. What 
you are demanding to make universal is that law which is 
an abomination to mankind.'' 

What the theologian wishes to carry with him as of 
universal authority is his own conception of truth. He 
has nothing else to offer. We are all agreed that truth in 
itself, truth yet to be disclosed, whether latent in nature 
or in Revelation, will have full, divine authority when it 
comes. All that we wish to secure is perfect freedom in 
mining, reducing, and coining this gold. We admit no 
pre-emption. 

This difficulty and kindred difficulties have been ob-- 
scurely felt, and have resulted in a constant reduction of 



NATURALISM. 23 

the doctrine of inspiration, till only a shadow of its former 
self remains, — a subtile presence sustaining the mind in 
its spiritual action. Yet the only logical outcome of this 
softening tendency is naturalism, the mind free with its 
own powers. In the measure in which it lacks freedom, it 
lacks use, and the growth incident to use. 

The simplest form of the doctrine of inspiration, as the 
communication of truth without error, is the earlier form 
of verbal dictation. This gave at least an exterior prod- 
uct of a definite kind. Yet such an inspiration is so 
wholly out of keeping with the circumstances of Scripture 
composition, so inconsistent with the changeable forms 
and hap-hazard ways in which the Word has come down 
to us, so opposed to the real wants of men as to make it 
rationally untenable — outside the possible conclusions of a 
sound judgment. It is new cloth in an old garment that 
instantly makes the rent worse. But between this view 
and the view that inspiration stands simply for the mind*s 
hold upon truth, there is no intelligible stopping-place. 
The mind may be quickened and aided in many ways, it 
may attain penetrative and wide vision, but it cannot be 
pushed beyond its own limits, or be checked within them, 
without becoming confused, helpless, mechanical in its 
action. If its own insight is overstepped, something like 
verbal dictation must take the place of knowledge ; if it is 
repressed in its own powers, something very like defeat 
and barrenness must follow. The divine may be enclosed 
in the human, and it is so enclosed in all just, spiritual 
thought ; but how can it either restrain or transcend the 
human, w^'thout making the uses to which the human is then 
and there put to the same degree formal and valueless ? 

The surplus of revelation beyond insight, in whatever ^ 
way it is given, cannot be truth, either to him who utters 



24 THE NEW THEOLOGY, 

it or to those who receive it. It is the frenzy of an oracle 
the rhapsody of a mind unduly heated within itself, the 
unreason of man put for the reason of God. It would 
seem, therefore, that if we are to overpass the insight of 
the mind in any degree, the only and sufficient way of 
doing it, the way farthest removed from mysticism and 
those dark shadows of confusion and frailty which so 
easily rest on the human spirit, is this very way of verbal 
dictation. The mind may at last return to such a record 
later, with the hope of making something of it. Yet even 
then, if the truth is mastered, the truth and the spirit 
meet, in the instant of communication, on a level, and 
that level the level of naturalism. The feeling, therefore, 
which drives us away from verbal inspiration should carry 
us at once over to its only proper antithesis, the freedom 
of the human mind with the divine mind. 

We thus escape the conflict of two distinct methods : 
the mind's self-contained search after truth, and the put- 
ting of truth upon it by an agency external to it. All 
forceful inspiration must be perplexed by this incongruity 
of processes. So far as the Scriptures are made up of 
familiar facts, so far as they are the record of personal 
feelings, the purely natural suffices, and must suffice, for 
their explanation. But between human products and the 
immediate products of the divine mind, there must be a 
marked cleavage. To find this cleavage, define it, and 
respect it, will be a point of first importance, and of hope- 
less perplexity, in exegesis. 

Hence the doctrine of an authoritative inspiration has 
always been found more or less incompatible with free 
inquiry and thorough criticism. Christian men have had 
occasion, over and over again, to soften their notion of 
inspiration, and of the range of the truths dependent on it, 



NATURALISM. 2$ 

in order to meet the new facts brought before them, and 
the growing temper of inquiry. The progress of truth 
has been delayed, and bitter and misleading discussions 
have arisen, because of the doctrine of inspiration. The 
facts of science, as in reference to the creation, have first 
been contemptuously rejected, then slowly received, and, 
last of all, made fully compatible with a modified view of 
the authority of the Scriptures. Free inquiry cannot 
readily proceed, when its path may be crossed at any 
moment by this line of cleavage which separates human 
thoughts and divine truths, the partial and the relative 
from the complete and the absolute. The doctrine of in- 
spiration has not, empirically, justified itself as a means of 
entering into all knowledge. It gives occasion to the 
very strange assertion that complex spiritual truth, as it 
lies in the human mind, can be absolute. We thus reach 
a result the exact opposite of that we had in view. The 
doctrine of inspiration arises largely from diffidence, a 
distrust of human wisdom. We are compelled, however, 
in defence of the doctrine, to affirm that the most wide- 
reaching truths are complete and final in human know- 
ledge. It thus cuts us off from that ever renewed inquiry 
into them which is at once the real modesty and true 
power of human thought. 

The moral .discipline of the world is thereby funda- 
mentally disturbed. That discipline consists quite as 
much in finding the truth, in correcting and enlarging it, 
as in obeying it. Indeed, these two things are insepar- 
able from each other. At no point ought this discipline to 
be more ample and obligatory than in connection with 
religious truth. But so far as inspiration renders this 
truth complete and final, it limits inquiry and arrests 
moral training. Religious truth is thrown out of har- 



26 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

mony with other forms of truth, and rehgious action with 
the action of the world. Everywhere else investigation 
is in order, and is allowed freely to correct all previous 
conclusions. Not thus is it in faith, and the inevitable 
result follows. Human thought, in its freedom, lashes 
against these boundaries of the religious world, and the 
air is filled with needless confusion and clamor. 

No strong tendency, however, is found in the spiritual 
world without some underlying reason. What is the 
reason which has so long sustained this doctrine of inspi- 
ration, and made it the very citadel of theological belief ? 
It is, I think, our just sense of dependence on God, and 
our desire to be assured of his guidance. This feeling 
has given this belief, as it so readily does other truths, too 
exterior and mechanical a form. The great gifts of God 
are in ourselves. His chief aid is in the very action of our 
own powers. Everything else is quite secondary to this. 
The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. Inspiration prop- 
erly means a breath of life, a living transfer of the divine 
thought to us, a free participation on our part in it. We 
deny a formal inspiration only that we may insist on a 
real one. We brush aside an external, ineffectual gift, 
only that we may accept an all-sufficing one in the mind 
itself. God does most for us, when we are doing most 
for ourselves ; and we no longer make any division be- 
tween the human and the divine in truth. It is all human, 
all divine ; the atmosphere in which the spirit of man and 
the spirit of God meet each other. The spiritual dis- 
, places the mechanical, and when we think of God justly, 
God is present with us. His spirit is the spirit of truth, 
and testified within the mind itself. Truth is a living 
presence passing forever between mind and mind. Inspi- 
ration is always one thing, intelHgence rejoicing in the 



NATURALISM. 2/ 

light which floods the universe from the Divine Presence. 
We are not denying the doctrine, we are placing it on a 
more adequate and comprehensive foundation. We are 
identifying the method of God in Revelation with his 
universal method in the world. We are giving the actions 
of God the harmony and extension which belong to them. 
We are enforcing naturalism. 

This belief of a sufficient and final statement of reli- 
gious truth in the Scriptures lacks proof. Wanting clear- 
ness and inner coherence, it requires a degree and form 
_of proof which it is difficult to furnish. If the Scriptures, 
by complete harmony and absolute correctness, so far as 
we can test these qualities, seemed to justify this claim 
of divine authorship ; if the notion of divine authorship 
could be so framed as to include no incongruous terms ; 
if the Scriptures themselves explicitly affirmed their su- 
pernatural origin, there might be an internal force in these 
concurrent facts that would carry conviction. But none 
of these things are present. There is much in the Scrip- 
tures which embarrasses this claim of infallible inspira- 
tion, and renders it hard to accept ; the notion is not 
coherent within itself or analogous to the divine method 
in other directions ; and the statements of the Bible on 
the subject are such as readily to receive a much less 
rigid interpretation. 

If we were to look for external proof of this doctrine of 
divine intervention, and demand this evidence in a suf- 
ficient form, the unsustained assertions of the writers 
themselves would go but a little way in establishing the 
dogma. No man can testify to his own inspiration, or to 
the inspiration of another, in a conclusive form. The 
facts are too obscure, and admit of too easy misappre- 
hension. This testimony must be sustained, as Christ 



28 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

said of his own testimony, by the witness of God. We 
should thus be compelled, under external proof, to call for 
a perfectly explicit assertion of superhuman intervention, 
and the direct support of the declaration by miraculous 
power. Moreover, the entire proof so made out, should 
be transmitted to us in a method beyond reasonable crit- 
icism. Any weakness in any of these particulars would 
so reduce the evidence as to destroy its irrefragable 
character. It belongs to so definite and so extraordinary 
a claim as this of divine aid, and one involving such 
ample resources, to be equally definite and startling in its 
vindication. The supernatural, when offered as a fact, 
must establish itself undeniably out of its own abundant 
means. A distinct, divine element in Revelation must 
not be so hidden and smothered by natural causes as to 
lose its true position. This is to breed hopeless confusion, 
and leave the mind without any secure footing. 

The proofs actually offered of a transcendent inspira- 
tion are very far from meeting these claims. They are 
chiefly assertions in the New Testament made concerning 
the Old Testament, and one and all they easily accept the 
less rigid construction. Thus Paul says : " All Scripture 
is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for re- 
proof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.'* ^ 
Certainly ; this assertion is every way as true on the sup- 
position that the mind of the writer, enveloped in the 
thought of God, is thoroughly possessed by the truth, as 
on the supposition that this truth is in any way pushed 
beyond his powers. Errors of thought and of expression 
do not prevent the profitableness of Scripture for reproof, 
correction, instruction. They rather put it on the same 
plane with our other terms of discipline in these purposes. 

^2 Tim. iii., i6. 



NATURALISM. 29 

Inspiration, in this passage, may as readily mean a normal, 
as an abnormal, action of mind. 

Peter seems more explicit when he declares : ^^ Prophecy 
came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of 
God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." ^ 
While we can put into these words the stronger form of 
inspiration, if our minds are already convinced, they 
readily receive the weaker one. The will of man is con- 
trasted with holy men of God, and means not human 
action, but human action as separating itself from divine 
counsel. The antithesis lies between the obedient and 
the disobedient temper, and not between human thought 
and divine thought. The force we give to the words, 
'* moved by the Holy Ghost,'* will turn on our apprehension 
of the ofifice of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth. The 
coming of the Holy Spirit is especially emphasized by 
Christ. In his last address to his disciples he says : ^* I will 
pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, 
that he may abide with you forever, the Spirit of Truth > 
whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, 
neither knowxth him, but ye know him, for he dwelleth 
with you and shall be in you.'* ^ These assertions are not to 
be urged as promises of a special inspiration to accompany 
the disciples. This rendering is much too narrow. They 
are addressed through the disciples to us all. They stand 
for the general and comprehensive fact of the fellowship 
of all good men in spiritual truth with God, the eternal 
Spirit of Truth. Such a declaration as this, we live and 
move and have our being in God, should sweep from our 
thoughts, as by a whirlwind running before the Divine 
Presence, any notion of any particular and narrow and 
sub-conscious way in which a few favored minds are acted 

* 2 Pet. i., 21. ^ John xiv., 16, 17. 



30 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

on of God. No ; it would be the infinite misfortune of 
these elect disciples — shall I say of seclusion and mystery 
— not to have been fully brought forth into the light of 
the Spirit of Truth ; not to have stood with the Word 
of God and the household of God in the open presence 
of God. The condition of a simple believer, living and 
moving and having his being in God, is one infinitely pref- 
erable to that of a disciple, so pressed upon and unfairly 
dealt with by the divine strength as to become the mouth- 
piece of truth beyond his own mastery. Such a separa- 
tion of the inspired writer is to his own detriment and 
dishonor. God*s methods are large, generous, general. 
They belong to all believers. He does for each of them 
the best possible thing. There is no hierarchy based on 
exceptional power or position. We all drink of the cup 
of Christ, and are baptized Vv^ith his baptism. 

" There is a spirit in man,'' says Job, *^ and the inspira- 
tion of the Almighty giveth them understanding." ^ 
What could it do less than this ; what could it do 
more than this ! Understanding is the inspiration of the 
Almighty. It is his own life. The entrance of the word 
giveth light. Thus Peter feels that he has right to the gen- 
eral exhortation : '^ If any man speak, let him speak as 
the oracles of God." ^ Yes, indeed, if any man speak, let 
him speak as the oracles of God. 

The idea of inspiration is somewhat definitely disclosed 
by the sacred writers. So grand a thing is knowledge felt 
to be by them that, even in its inferior forms, and wrong- 
ful forms, it is referred to divine wisdom, and likened unto 
it. God is represented as saying concerning Bezaleel, the 
son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe "of Judah : '* I 
have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in 

^ Job xxxii., 8. ^ I Pet. iv. ii. 



NATURALISM. 3 1 

understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of 
workmanship to devise cunning works, to work in gold 
and in silver and in brass." ^ Not a more explicit statement 
is anywhere made of inspiration than is covered by the 
skill ascribed to this workman in gold and silver and brass. 
A little farther on it is said : *^ In the hearts of all that are 
wise-hearted I have put wisdom." It is also affirmed : 
" The counsel of Ahithophel, w^hich he counselled in those 
days, was as if a man had inquired of the oracles of 
God."^ 

The Scriptures give us other indications of the nature 
of inspiration. Says Luke, in opening his gospel: 
" It seemed good to me also, having had perfect under- 
standing of all things from the very first, to write unto 
thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou 
mightest know the certainty of those things wherein 
thou hast been instructed." He does not so much as 
intimate that his w^ords are to have any other authority 
than this of his personal knowledge ; a grievous mistake, 
certainly, if the real subscription of his gospel, giving it 
weight, is the divine autograph. In the presence of such 
a confirmation, other grounds of trust would be insignifi- 
cant. The apostles claim authority for this testimony as 
eye-witnesses of the event. Is this then their authority, 
or is it not ? 

The Gospels, like other portions of Scripture, taken in 
their relation to each other, declare, as conclusively as 
any set of facts can declare, their own character, that 
they were put together out of changeable and incomplete 
material, material so incomplete as to preclude either a 
consecutive or a full narrative. What is their weakness, 
from one point of view, goes far to establish their essen- 

^ Ex. xxxi., 3. ^2 Sam. xvi., 23. 



32 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

tial correctness. Their variety of form, taken in connec- 
tion with their general coherence in spirit and substance, 
calls for that substratum of facts on which they claim to 
rest. We are thus indebted to the particular knowledge 
of Luke for the preservation of the two parables of the 
prodigal son and the good Samaritan, containing the 
most explicit development of the two factors of faith, — 
the love of God and the love of man — and to St. John 
for the full spiritual force of the words of Christ. 

A sound mind cannot easily see the extent to which 
these thoroughly natural causes have been wrought into the 
very substance of the Gospels, determining what has been 
saved and what lost in the teachings and life of Christ, 
without feeling that this naturalism, which has been 
allowed such range among these most precious things, 
must be supreme throughout; that the words and acts 
of Christ, like all instruction from the beginning until 
now, were committed unreservedly to the flow of events. 
The seed was scattered, and fell, some by the wayside, 
some on good ground. Any other conclusion is incongru- 
ous, improbable, and so irrational. The force of circum- 
stances declares itself everywhere. There is no divine 
intervention, correcting the confusion of the narrative, or 
supplying its deficiencies. We seem to be compelled to 
admit that the partial and confused knowledge that lies on 
the face of the Gospels expresses the real facts in the case. 

If we contrast the Gospels with each other, we find dis- 
crepancies very unexpected on the supposition of an over- 
ruling inspiration, but perfectly natural, not to say unavoid- 
able, if each author is left to make the best he can of his 
own resources. Even the Lord's Prayer is not given in 
the same words by the two evangelists, and one or both 
of the forms are, therefore, inaccurate. If these most select 



NATURALISM. 33 

possible words are inexact, what is there that may not be 
so ? If w^e compare the Sermon on the Mount as recorded 
by Matthew and by Luke, the agreement between the 
two renderings is sufficient to show that the wTiters have 
in view the same discourse, while the omissions and 
variations on the part of Luke indicate plainly that his 
knowledge, in this particular, was much less complete 
than that of Matthew. Indeed, his version of the beati- 
tudes is so imperfect as to be liable, taken by itself, to mis- 
lead us as to their very spirit. Matthew says : ^^ Blessed 
are the poor . in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven." Says Luke : ^' Blessed be ye poor, for yours is 
the kingdom of God.** Matthew tenderly affirms, ^' Blessed 
are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted "; Luke, 
in a temper much less subdued, declares, ^^ Blessed are 
ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh.'* We can hardly 
doubt which is the more correct statement of the gentle, 
discriminating w^ords of our Lord. A feeling of alarm 
passes over us at the danger we have incurred of missing 
the spiritual aroma that attended on the real utterances of 
Christ, by the imperfect version of some one evangelist. 

It IS hardly admissible, in the presence of such facts, to 
say that Matthew and Luke are alike preserved by divine 
intervention from material error. They are too plainly 
not kept from decided deficiency and partial mistakes. 
We may, well think lightly of these discrepancies, if all we 
wish for is an open path to the mind of Christ ; but if we 
are in search of explicit and final authority, this desire at 
once makes them serious. If we still insist that the evan- 
gelists are preserved from any serious error, we are putting 
ourselves on ground that is tenable only because it is vague 
and indefinite. No facts are a sufficient refutation of an 

erratic spirit of interpretation. As men of sound minds,^ 
3 



34 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

we ought to meet all these weak defences of the highest 
truths with an earnest protest in the name of sober reason 
and simple righteousness. How exact and ample is the 
assertion of Peter : '^ Ye have purified your spirits in 
obeying the truth through the Spirit/' ^ What other liv- 
ing office is there for the Spirit than that given'by John: 
'' He will guide you into all truth/' ^ These processes 
of thought and action are perfectly normal, and we 
are not incautiously to allow any confusion to creep into 
them. If our theory is unsound, what will our results be 
under it? If we set aside reason in* initiating inquiry, 
how shall we restore it in its progress ? 

Paul is especially relied on for dogmatic authority. But 
Paul's epistles, as the Epistle to the Romans, or the 
Epistle to the Galatians, are full of debate, argument, 
proof. What is the significancy of this fact ? Evidently 
this: he is relying on the inner coherence, justness, and 
energy of his presentation for its authority. His force is 
that of discussion, and being that of discussion it is neither 
more nor less than it. Having finished the argument, he 
is not at liberty to say : These logical relations are not 
the grounds of my assertion, its real grounds are the in- 
forming words of the Holy Spirit. First to make an appeal 
to reason, and later to withdraw into the presence cham- 
ber of Deity, is illusive and dishonorable. If one should 
offer us conclusions which seemed to be wholly his own, 
and when he had called forth discussion and contradiction 
should proceed to quell it with the affirmation : These are 
simply the words of the highest authority on this subject, 
we. should feel that we had been dealt with unfairly. We 
had been drawn into the field of debate by false appear- 
ances. Paul is not right in putting his own personality 
^ I Pet. i., 22. 2 johj^ xvi., 13. 



NATURALISM. 35 

back of his words to the degree in which he does, if, after 
all, it does not belong there ; if he is tempting us to cross 
swords with him and then leaving us to shiver our weapons 
on the buckler of the Almighty. For my part I must have 
too exalted an opinion of St. Paul to believe that he ever 
did any such thing. If he was a divine herald of truth, 
one method, and one only, properly belonged to him, 
that of quiet, exact utterance of the message entrusted to 
him, as one resting on an authority infinitely beyond his 
own. Who is able to sort out things human and things 
divine when once coxnmingled, and to assign each its true 
value ? 

His own view seems certainly to be, not this, suffi- 
cient and final authority, but this, an earnest search after 
truth. '^ We know in part and we prophesy in part." 
** Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to 
face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as 
I am known." ' This is his exhortation : ^^ Having these 
gifts, differing according to the grace that is given us, 
whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the pro- 
portion of faith."'' With a noble humility and a divine 
courage, he says : '* Brethren, I count not myself to have 
apprehended ; but this one thing I do, forgetting the 
things which are behind and reaching forth unto the 
things which are before, I press forward toward the mark 
of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." ^ 
Grand Apostle of Truth ; let nothing intervene between 
our souls and thy soul, as nothing intervenes between thy 
soul and God. It is this fellowship of life with life, in 
. one eternal movement toward God, that is alone regenera- 
tive in human experience. Is there not in these words of 
Paul something very like a direct testimony against a full 

^ I Cor. xiii., g, 12. '^ Rom. xii., 6. ^ Phil, iii., 13. 



36 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

and sufficient revelation of truth ? This doctrine of in- 
spiration carries with it immeasurable confusion when we 
are dealing with the expression of personal feeling, the 
poetic insight of David, the pathetic lament of Jeremiah, 
the forecast of Isaiah, the tenderness of John, the up-lift 
of St. Paul. These things must be human, genuine, 
through and through, or they sink into spiritual rubbish. 

We cannot manage the personal element, which ap- 
pears so frequently, so freely, and so profitably in 
Scripture, otherwise than by accepting it as perfectly 
sincere. Paul's estimate of faith, hope, and charity, con- 1 
tained in the thirteenth chapter of the first Epistle to 
the Corinthians, must be understood as the product of 
his own experience ; and his fervid exclamation in the 
eighth of Romans, opening'with the words, ^^ Who shall 
separate us from the love of Christ,'* must be rejoiced in,;, 
as the fulness of his own affection. 

One is also justified in supposing that if the apostles 
were under a complete protection against error in spirituall 
things, this fact would have shown itself in their words* 
and actions as well as in their writings ; in their handling 
of the early ch^urches under the circumstances of peculiar 
perplexity and danger which they encountered. We 
must have the strongest reasons for asserting an inspira- 
tion in their written words which we do not find in their 
spoken words. When the Gospel began to be freely 
preached to the Gentiles, and accepted by them, the 
relation of these converts to the Jewish church and to 
Jewish observances came before an apostolic synod at 
Jerusalem for settlement. While a wise and acceptable 
conclusion was reached, it is quite certain that a good 
deal of diversity of opinion and feeling appeared among 
the apostles, and that this division of sentiment remained 



NATURALISM. 37 

a long time. St. Paul and St. James occupied extreme posi- 
tions, while St. Peter vacillated somewhat between them. 
Paul's account of the synod, given in the second chapter of 
Galatians, shows that the irritation of the discussion was 
considerable, lingered many years in the differences it 
involved, and frequently embarrassed him in his work. 
'' Those who seemed to be somewhat, whatsoever they 
were, it maketh no matter to me : God accepteth no 
man's person ; for they who seemed to be somewhat " — 
James, Peter, and John — '' in conference added nothing 
to me." 

This difference of view is so far reproduced in the 
epistles of Paul and of James, that acute and earnest 
exegetes have been unable to reconcile the two statements. 
A fact of such supreme importance, in the early histor^^ 
of the Church, as this of the divided feehng of the apos- 
tles on the manner of extending the Gospel does not 
accord with the supposition of a divine guidance that 
precluded error of doctrine. The apostles seem to have 
been left, like the servants of truth everywhere, to make 
what shift they could in reaching their conclusions and 
doing their work. No exception was made in their be- 
half to the universal method. But if they were not able 
to guide themselves perfectly under the most critical and 
important circumstances, how shall they guide us without 
error? Though much more importance has been at- 
tached to these differences of opinion than belongs to 
them, they evidently involved some error and limitation 
of view. 

We have now said enough to show that we have no 
burden of proof to overcome in rejecting a doctrine of 
inspiration that carries the impulse toward truth off the 
plane of human powers. We are at full liberty, therefore, 



38 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

to consider the historic results of this doctrine, and the 
mischievous part it has played in theology. Dogmatic 
development tends to three phases. The truth which lies 
back of any dogma is first held freely, uncritically, with 
changeable definition. The truth is submissive to a 
living purpose in the feelings and actions. The period of 
analysis has not come. The thoughts have not yet 
turned back on themselves in the process of exposition 
and defence. Later, under the push of speculation and * 
unbelief, doctrine is turned into definite dogma, which 
the believer is called on to accept under specific terms. 
The chief interest of this phase of movement is intellec- 
tual, not vital. Still later, when these limits of thought 
are found to be insufferable bounds, robbing the truth and 
the mind under the truth of their proper liberty, they are 
broken over, and belief is taken up again into a more spir- 
itual experience, with deeper and more personal insight, 
and with more living service. What the truth thus loses 
in precision, it far more than gains in scope and power. 
Henceforth it ranks with those divine things which give 
light without themselves being fully disclosed in the light. 
In this process of development, partial and misleading 
images are cast aside ; rigid terms of definition are burned 
up in the heat of the mind's action ; and the conceptions 
under consideration come to be held, like moisture in the 
atmosphere, as life-giving terms, capable of many, most 
variable, most beautiful manifestations, no one of them 
final. The dogmatic period is transitional between a lower 
and higher use of truth. It lies between conceptions less 
purified and spiritualized, and those more purified and 
spiritualized. It is a hasty crystallization of the truth, 
but it aids in separating its real substance from an obscure 
admixture of sensuous elements. The dogma is dissolved 



NATURALISM. 39 

again in a purer medium the moment the growing 
mind calls for it in its living processes ; and in each of 
these dissolutions and distillations and crystallizations, it 
gains additional purity. This movement of thought is 
every way wholesome. The storm-clouds that lie low and 
massive and threatening, when the winds have passed and 
the tumult ceased, reappear serene, orderly, infinitely 
peaceful in the upper air. 

The engine, with sharp puff and visible power, flings 
out in the frosty air great billowy masses of vapor and 
smoke, full of expansive force. This voluminous and 
luminous mass is pervaded by the inherent energies which 
create it. As the engine passes on, this streamer of clouds 
is slowly dissolved. The vapor, its potent term, is ab- 
sorbed in the atmosphere, and the smoke, its dead term, 
remains a dark trail behind it. So in a dogmatic contro- 
versy, instinct with living tendencies, the power of spirit- 
ual convictions is quickly reabsorbed, while the verbal 
deposit lingers only to obscure and cloud the horizon, and 
mark the path that has been left behind. 

The doctrine of the Trinity assumed form in the midst 
of theosophic and Gnostic speculations. Occult concep- 
tions, foreign to our experience and alien to the Christian 
temper, find expression in it. In the eternal begetting of 
the Son, and the perpetual procession of the Spirit from 
the Son and the Father, we are in the midst of images 
which have no explanatory pov/er. The doctrine of the 
atonement received its most explicit statement at a time 
when Roman law was in full revival, and common law was 
beginning to move in its fountains. The result was a 
narrow, governmental view of our relations to God, which 
we have been sloAvly casting off ever since. The smoke 
of the cloud could not be absorbed in the spiritual atmos- 



40 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

phere as a medium of life, and we have waited long for it 
to fall to the earth as cinder and dust. 

The doctrine of inspiration reached its rigid and exact 
statement in the scholastic period of reformed theology ; 
the period which followed its first years of protest and 
strength. Protestant theologians, having broken with the 
church and with tradition, sought authority, in a period in 1 1 
which authority was chiefly external and counted for much, 
in the Scriptures. They pushed the doctrine to the full . 
extent of verbal inspiration. This conclusion was the ^ | 
opaque element obstructive to vision, and we are still 
waiting for a pure and pellucid medium between us and 
the works of God, between us and God. The slow sepa- 
ration has gone on, however, and there now remains to 
many Christian minds only one trace of darkness, the ar- 
bitrary assertion that the Spirit is present in Scripture for 
the positive anticipation of error in spiritual things. This 
is the last, low trail of the cloud that covered half the 
heavens. 

The uses of the doctrine of inspiration — by no means 
unimportant, times, places, and persons being considered 
— have shown two forms of unequal value, and often of 
conflicting force. This doctrine aims at authority, and 
finds for it a pivotal point in the Scriptures. It was the 
desire for authority, and the supposed need of authority, 
which carried the doctrine in expression from point to 
point, till a final defence was set up in the assertion of the 
absolute verbal completeness of the divine message. 

This desire for authority in religious faith involves 
different -and diverse tendencies. It may come in satis- 
faction of an intellectual and spiritual craving for assured 
truth in a region of peculiar doubts and difficulties. 
The soul covets rest and casts itself freely on a belief 



NATURALISM. 4I 

that promises support. The sense of personal feebleness 
and confusion is met by the doctrine. But a very different 
and much less commendable feeling is often involved in 
this desire for authority. It is not rest for our own 
spirits that is sought for so much as conclusions that we 
can lay peremptorily upon others. The strength of the 
Church is felt to be the infallibility of its faith, and 
each zealous disciple becomes much in earnest to afifirm 
and to share this infallibility. The doctrine then arises 
in satisfaction of the wish to rule, so universally present 
to men. Those who hold the doctrine for this end easily 
fall into the condemnation of Christ : " For ye have taken 
away the key of knowledge ; ye entered not in yourselves, 
and them that were entering in ye hindered." ^ 

This desire for authority, this desire to arrest inquiry, ' 
as having fulfilled its purpose, is, in the world of per- 
sonal, spiritual experiences, a mistake. It means a point 
of support taken outside the mind itself, not the poise 
and rest of the mind within itself. Authority arises in 
suspension of the inner life of the soul. Its dicta become 
an indigestible something, incapable of assimilation, which 
has found its way into the food of the spirit. At no 
point does the divine method differ more broadly and 
fundamentally from the human method than at this 
point of authority. The very gist of divine nurture is"^to 
hold us steadily to the double duty of discovering and 
obeying the truth. We cannot well obey truth, till we 
can also understand it. The two processes demand the 
same temper, and something of the same wisdom. For- 
mal obedience, divorced from diligent inquiry, easily loses 
the very nature of virtue. A mistake in the method of 
faith may readily become a mistake in the very substance 

^ Luke xi., 52 



42 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

of faith, and quite mislead the mind. The bat, hanging 
head downward by hooks on his wings, is not more unHke 
the bird, riding restfully on the brisk wind, than is the 
mind, subjected to authority, unHke the mind that seeks 
freely unto God. To accept authority in religious truth 
is to run the risk of falling into the hands of religious 
rulers, and being employed for the most mischievous 
purposes of tyranny. 

This subject of authority is obscure with us, because 
we mingle, in its discussion, very different things. We 
confuse the spiritual ordering of the thoughts with the 
outward control of the actions by religious organizations. 
Men, in all stages of development, seek earnestly for 
authority in society, which stands with them for peace, 
strength, and good order. The Church, as clothed with 
power, has been a primary mxcans of construction. This 
beneficent service we associate with its authoritative 
interpretation of truth. But the limits of ecclesiasticism, 
as a form of government, are being reached. Those who 
think otherwise may still find spiritual control, in its 
most effective form, in the Catholic Church. It is the 
true mission of Protestantism to appeal to the liberty of 
the mind with the truth, and this appeal can accept no 
new limitations. It arises the moment thought is vigor- 
ous enough to claim its own laws of development, and 
assert itself as sufficient unto itself within its own spiritual 
realm. 

The masses of men may still need instruction in their 
search into religious truth, and personal influence in 
their obedience to it. This fact modifies, without altering, 
the fitness of freedom. Protestantism cannot vacillate 
between the old and the new. It must accept its own 
principles, and live by them. It strives in vain to main- 



1 



NATURALISM. 43 

tain the shreds of ecclesiastical authority by attaching 
an extraneous force to the truth, aside from its appeal 
to the mind. The order it strives to induce in society is 
a purely spiritual one, and, in attaining this order, it 
must fully accept the conditions it has laid down for 
itself. 

The doctrine of inspiration has deepened dissent and 
division in Protestant churches. It has enforced the 
letter, as opposed to the spirit, and made the devotees 
of faith blind and refractory from the outset. When a 
believer has laid hold of an exact statement, — as Luther 
of the words. This is my body, — it has been found 
impossible to shake him loose. Every verbal difference 
has been a barrier to be fought over with inexhaustible 
bitterness. If a free appeal to reason had been open, 
much confusion would have readily disappeared. But 
such an appeal was precluded by the doctrine of inspira- 
tion, and by the dogmatic temper attendant on it. The 
letter was not freely dissolved in the spirit, and so ready 
to crystallize again in obedience to the inner, rational 
movement. The soul became blind and bigoted by a 
false adhesion to misapplied symbols. A judicial temper 
was lost, and a confused and obstinate one took its 
place. What inexhaustible stores of fanaticism and folly 
have been found in The Revelation. This one book, by its 
abuse, has blighted many a spirit which it should have 
blessed. 

When one begins to talk about the number of the 
beast, and make up the sum of years which lies between 
us and the millennium, we feel that he is hopelessly drop- 
ping off from the Divine Mind as disclosed in the march 
of events. 

The effort to secure authority has resulted in the loss 



44 THE NEW THEOLOGY. , 

of authority, a device to prevent division has increased 
division, and discussion of peculiar bitterness has grown 
out of that which forbade discussion. The army of be- 
Hevers has been scattered and peeled, wrangling over 
innumerable trifles, and unable to see the sun in the 
heavens. The sharp, acrimonious strife over the bread 
and the wine, over the form of baptism, over the seventh 
day and Sunday, offers such a tithing of mint, anise, and 
cumin, as was scarcely surpassed in the Jewish Church, 
Mind and heart have been alike blinded and blasted by 
this turning of small things into large ones. God's world 
has been hidden behind one's fingers. 

The search for authority, we have seen, is double, 
authority in support of trembling faith, and authority 
against recalcitrant faith. Not only did external authority 
put irreconcilable division between believers, it ultimately 
weakened faith within the soul itself. This has been the 
second grave mistake in the doctrine of inspiration, a 
mistake that stands in bold relief theoretically and his- 
torically — the loss of the hold of the mind on truth as 
truth. - The doctrine has acted in contradiction of the 
words of Christ : Ye shall know the truth, and the truth 
shall make you free. If there is one fundamental thing 
which the Christian Church has lacked, in a conspicuous 
way; one fundamental thing which it should have pos- 
sessed in a conspicuous degree, it has been tolerance, 
an earnest and wide search for truth, and a patient hold- 
ing fast to it in tenderness. 

The spirit of science has risen in the assembly of the 
saints to administer well-deserved censure. The failure of 
the Church to nourish a truth-loving, truth-seeking temper 
is attributable, in large part, to this very doctrine of in- 
spiration. The Church was supposed to possess perfect 



NATURALISM. 45 

truth, and had, therefore, no occasion to go in search of it. 
Those who ventured out of beaten paths were thought of 
not as eager inquirers in the world of Revelation, but as 
foolish adventurers, wickedly forsaking the old ways. 
That which made this independent search more difficult, 
made it also, when undertaken, more dangerous. The 
mind was thrown, to begin with, into a defiant, rash atti- 
tude, and found itself at every step unsustained and 
uncorrected. A headlong, resentful temper bore it on 
toward error. Nothing can well be more oppugnant to 
an indwelling of the spirit of truth in the minds of all, 
than this bondage to the letter, which attends on any com- 
plex statement as a final form of thought. No matter 
how simple the words may be, religious principles are im- 
measurable in their scope. The divine impulse may at 
any moment transcend its previous terms. 

This conception of inspiration is inapplicable to higher 
forms of truth. Truth is not a verbal proposition. It is 
the inner, visible coincidence of thought and the subject 
of thought. As long as w^e are dealing with words, we 
are missing ideas, we are missing truth. No matter how 
correct any given formula may be, when offered to us, it 
holds no truth till we too see its relation to the facts cov- 
ered by it. Truth is the insight of the mind, nothing less, 
nothing more. A divine push, that pushes the mind off 
this balance of thought, is violence in the spiritual world. 
Words are paper currency in the exchange of thought, 
and owe their value to their power to command the coin 
of truth. Used otherwise, they are illusive symbols of 
value, and not value itself. To give, therefore, authority 
to words, or to an irreconcilable conception that lies back 
of them, is the worst possible sin against the truth, since it 
blocks all farther pursuit of it, all possible approach to it. 



46 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

This seems very plain, when we are deahng with the 
more profound forms of truth. Who would think of 
understanding mathematics otherwise than by under- 
standing it, or penetrating the divine purpose in the 
government of the world otherwise than by penetrating 
it ! There are some limited and comparatively barren 
statements of facts which can be made to us in words, 
rendered by us in familiar images, and accepted without 
any insight. But these assertions lie in a narrow, sensu- 
ous experience, and play a very small part in Revelation. 
Revelation, as a profound fact, is understanding the mind 
of God, and this means that our thoughts are keeping 
pace with his thought, that our spiritual experiences are 
touching their meridian in the noontide of his presence. 

Strangely enough, when the Apostle Peter states twice 
over, quite explicitly, a simple fact that transcends our 
knowledge, and yet comes within the forms of imagina- 
tion, the preaching of Christ to the spirits in prison, a 
large share of the Christian Church turns from the asser- 
tion as one inconsistent with previous convictions. If 
revelation of unknown events — a direction in which reve- 
lation is most possible — is sought for, here it is, and yet it 
is here to very little purpose. It is well for us to remem- 
ber that from this most obvious form of a supernatural 
disclosure the Scriptures keep quite aloof. 

The one divine attitude, on our part, is teachableness, a 
meekness and poverty of spirit which are slowly enriched 
by the kingdom of Heaven. We must not account our- 
selves to have attained, but, forgetting the things that are 
behind, press forward toward the mark of the prize of our 
high calling in Christ Jesus. Certainly, timid and feeble 
minds can be helped, but they must be helped on the 
basis of naturalism and not off of it. Otherwise they sink 



NATURALISM. 47 

into hopeless dependence, spiritual pauperism, and are pecu- 
liarly liable, under any sudden trial, to drop into unbelief. 

The slovenly reasoning we often meet with in the re- 
ligious world, the narrow outlook from a single window 
thrown open for a specific purpose, should pass away, and 
Vv^e should learn to meet God in his own world, in his own 
large way, through the entire range of his providences. We 
should follow Christ heedfuliy as he moves among men, 
letting fall his blessings on those who are nearest to him. 
If fundamental truth is ever and always that which dis- 
closes to us the mind of God, then inspiration, in its higher 
forms, must be insight, understanding Christ, when Vv^e are 
with him, behold his works, and hear his words. 

The apparent reverence expressed by the doctrine of 
inspiration is often deceitful, and simply puts the mind in 
bondage to human authority. The echo and re-echo of 
dogma in the region of dialectics take from us the sim- 
plicity and purity of heart by which we see God. We 
have no inner habit by which we find our way alone into 
the Divine Presence. Among the various renderings of 
the Scripture, we accept that as inspired with which we 
are familiar. We are bowing to a divine authority, but it 
is an authority which is expressed to us in a very human 
way, by very fallible men. The entire relation of man to 
God IS embarrassed. Instead of inquiring directly into 
the truth, we are put upon an indirection in which men 
and system.s and interpretations and transmissions play a 
leading part. The soul, seeking unto God, is fairly caught 
in the net of churchcraft. If thine eye is single, it shall 
be full of light. The importance attached to some devia- 
tion from an established standard greatly increases this 
confusion, and leaves the mind worn out, and its strength 
wasted, by the mere accidents of sound thought. 



48 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

A faulty form of inspiration mingles hopelessly the 
natural and the supernatural. We meet with no dififi- 
culty in the supernatural ; we accept it with lightness and 
gladness of heart ; we believe it to stand in living relations 
with the natural, and so standing, to be the sensible joy 
of the Divine Presence. As the higher powers of man 
are first rooted in his physical endowments, and, deeper 
down, in the very soil of the earth, and yet preserve their 
transcendent character, so the supernatural, in its true 
form, is the very flower and fragrance of the natural, 
the vanishing point of physical laws as they are taken up 
into the divine purpose — clouds that are losing form and 
color and melting into the blaze of light about them. 

We cannot understand the world without the living, 
spiritual presence of God in it, and the miraculous is this 
presence in its most sensuous form ; the mind and heart, 
of God overpassing, with a little intensity of emphasis, 
their ordinary expression. A supernatural, therefore, 
which arises in fulfilment of the natural, is in most pro- 
found sympathy with it, is the voice of the speaker, in 
fitting intonation, ringing the thought on its way ; is the 
light and heat with which the electric current discloses its 
presence. The supernatural is deeply affiliated with the 
inmost force of faith, and rational life. 

We take objection to the Divine Presence which attends 
on the doctrine of inspiration, not because it is super- 
natural, but because it enters in suspension of the highest 
form of the natural, the insight of mind ; because it substi- 
tutes for the purest impulse of reason in the human soul, 
we know not what obscure and blind tendency ; because 
it represents God as acting, not as we find him acting, a 
God of order, but as one of confusion. This method gives 
us heat, without light ; is not so much a tongue of flame 



NATURALISM. 49 

resting harmlessly on men, as one of fire burning them up. 
A repression of human power has always gone with this 
controlling sense of the divine hand. The thoughts of 
men, the activities of men, have been overborne by it, 
and the spirit of truth has been sought rather as a power 
to quicken the dead than as one to give more life to the 
living, more wisdom to counsel, more coherence to labor, 
more justification to hope. There has thus arisen a deep- 
seated tendency to displace the earthly life with the 
heavenly life, rather than to make the one the harmonious 
prelude of the other ; to invoke with importunate and 
painful prayer a divine intervention, rather than to fill 
full, sweetly full, with pure waters, all the fountains and 
, streams of our present being. The supernatural has over- 
] whelmed the natural, and so has lost its own right to be, 
and to be believed in. This is a most fatal mistake, and 
I has given rise to much of the unbelief that now attends 
I on religion. If nature and faith are found in conflict, 
( there can be no doubt with which the victory will rest. 
i. Inspiration, real inspiration, is the light that springs up 
' at the point of highest, most harmonious, union of the 
natural and the supernatural, the human and the divine, 
I in their perpetual passage into each other in all wisdom 
I and righteousness. The natural, by itself alone, is dead, 
' the body without the soul, the word without the idea ; 
i the supernatural, breaking in on and displacing the natu- 
I ral, is a stress of life too great for the physical, intellectual 
powers which sustain it, a meaning so intense as to strangle 
1 the forms of speech through which it struggles to express 
, itself. As long as God is the immanent soul of things, let 
us not fear to handle freely the divine thought, let us 
I make sure rather that we are dealing with this thought, 
' declared in the full light of day, aad not with the phos- 
i 4 



50 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

phorescent gleams of decaying things, superstitions that 
still flicker on the horizon of belated spirits. Inspiration 
is the rational extension of the divine thought in the 
minds of men. Knowledge as knowledge involves the 
highest, most normal, activity of mind. This activity is 
nourished on two sides : by what we know as nature, in 
the narrow use of the word— strictly causal relations ; and 
by what we know as the supematu^al, a divine presence 
in these fixed relations, both ordering and extending them. 
Knowledge contains in itself both terms, — the fixed and 
the free, the thing comprehended and the comprehending 
power — and demands them both in all its higher acts of 
acquisition. 

If we insist that a determinate inspiration pervades the 
Scriptures, or even their spiritual truths, — though it cer-l 
tainly is not easy to separate between the historic facts 
and the moral principles they contain — we put all the dif- 
ficulties, and the growing difficulties, of exegesis at their 
maximum, and make any material failure to meet them 
fatal. We carry our costly vase in our hands, yet to drop 
it once is to shatter it utterly. The authority of the 
Bible, and so our view of its value, are imperilled at every 
step of interpretation, and we are tempted to shield it in 
many disingenuous ways. It has thus suffered wreck and 
rescue many times already. A single rock may be fatal 
to the bravest ship that ever floated, and one failure may* 
destroy the whole fabric of faith, built up on this extrav- 
agant claim. A double evil follows : many persons are 
precipitated into entirely needless unbelief ; and many, 
evading this result, become flimsy and insufficient in 
thought, unprogressive and narrow in action, and unspir- 
itual in the very substance of their lives. The theological 
juind^ instead of sharing to the full the extraordinary im- 



NATURALISM. 5 1 

pulse of our times ; instead of making the divine char- 
acter tally with the enlarging revelation of it in the world, 
has often been busily occupied, in the last half century, 
in contending against the progress of knowledge, and 
with futile contrivances to protect its own theories. What 
should have been a heavenly discipline, infinitely enlar- 
ging faith, has been productive of miserable makeshifts, 
stupid denials, reluctant concessions, half apprehensions. 
Such an attitude confirms unbelief in the unbelieving, and 
divides the religious camp into hostile factions, chafing 
under the endless collisions of the progressive and the 
dogmatic temper. 

The indescribable and bitter bigotry of the mediaeval 
era, begetting all narrowness of thought and cruelty of 
method, resting like the shadow of a wrathful heavens on 
the whole community, issuing in an insane sacrifice of 
human life, instead of passing utterly away, has given 
place but slowly to a crabbed temper that makes each 
necessary concession too late to escape its evils, too in- 
complete to use its fruits in growth. 

It is not easy to do the devout mind a more serious 
injury than this of putting the moral and the religious 
impulse in conflict. One or other of the two strongholds 
of our spiritual nature is weakened, our confidence in 
moral law or our confidence in its personal equivalent in 
the character of God. There is no more fundamental 
harmony in our personal development than that which 
should lie between ethical law and religious sentiment, 
between the government of the world and our conception 
of the mind of God. Yet the two are constantly falling 
apart, a fact often due to the irrefragable character given 
to dogma by this doctrine of inspiration. Religious men 
may come to entertain a kind of spite toward scientific 



52 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

inquiry and ethical truth, as if they were in some way 
enemies of rehgion. This they never can be- save by a 
strange perversion of knowledge and morality on the one 
hand, or of religion on the other. The first and second 
great commands are not more closely united than are 
morality and religion, knowledge and the will of God. 

This possible conflict between a moral precept and a 
command of God — as if the two were not necessarily the 
same — is brought out in the attempted sacrifice of Isaac 
by Abraham, and the ordinary interpretation of it. In 
this narrative and its exegesis the very human lesson of 
implicit, blind obedience is put forward, and the very 
divine lesson of patient, rational inquiry hidden behind it. 
Our ready acceptance of the story, in its literal form, 
grows out of the easy adhesion of our untrained thoughts 
to the miraculous, and the reluctance with which we take 
up the lessons of truth on their strictly natural basis. It 
is a strange perversion of the divine method to suppose 
that God, by a miraculous intervention, commanded • 
Abraham to violate the plainest principles of morality, 
and th,en left him in the confusion of thought thus 
begotten as a trial of faith. Nothing could well be more 
opposed to our experience of the way^ of God. Such 
devices would institute a hopeless conflict between the 
sober duties of life and our religious conceptions concern- 
ing them. If we suppose Abraham not yet wholly to 
have escaped from surrounding influences and the sense 
of the fitness of human sacrifice, and — as has been sug- 
gested^that this narrative marks the culmination of the 
struggle in his own life, then all is clear, and an inadmis- 
sible conception is no longer laid upon our credulous and 
overburdened faith. 

Like perplexities are constantly brought to us in the 



\ 



NATURALISM. 53 

study of the Old Testament by the absolute character 
given to its teachings. Things fundamentally wrong are 
passed upon as essentially right, and we are not allowed 
to understand them, in the only way in which they can 
bring us any instruction, as the products of the time and 
place to which they belonged. The mind thus loses its 
proper outlook on truth, its own advanced position, the 
training of God for thousands of years. 

If, on the other hand, we accept the Bible for what it 
so plainly is, a growing revelation, a slow finding by men 
of their way among spiritual things, the dangers and diffi- 
culties of interpretation disappear. The shell drops from . 
the kernel, and no edible portion is wasted. The Bible 
loses nothing and gains much. Slight flaws in the head 
of an axe are of no moment, flaws in its cutting edge are 
fatal. The view that we urge leaves the cutting edge of 
truth entire, and transfers defects to the dead w^eight that 
drives it. 

If we are confronted with the fact that God is repre- 
sented as offended w^ith David for numbering the children 
of Israel, and as inflicting a severe punishment on the entire 
nation for this fault of the ruler, we have only to reply, 
"Thus imperfectly did David conceive the divine charac- 
ter," and the criticism drops at once to the ground, like 
chaff from wheat. The imprecatory psalms do not hide 
the lustre of those of worship ; nor the pessimism of 
Ecclesiastes — " vanity of vanities, all is vanity " — burden 
the faith of Isaiah, beating its way heavenward with un- 
wearied wing. If St. Paul mistakenly expected the sec- 
ond coming of Christ, the fact offers no difficulty ; it is 
only our false attitude toward his opinion that is trouble- 
some to us. If truth is simply the inexhaustible light of 
divine love, it is immaterial exactly where that light falls, 



54 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

or how much of it seems to be lost. Like the light of 
day in, unclean or in desolate places, it is always pure and 
forever unmeasured ; thus is it with a divine message in 
the mouths of men. What subversion of first truths, 
what horrible fanaticism, what far-reacliing cruelty have 
been accelerated by the story of the witch of Endor and 
the command, '^ Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.'' 
Sound thought has given way before this injunction, and 
thousands of lives have been sacrificed to it ; and that, 
too, in a matter which touches most intimately the gov- 
ernment of God. 

We sum up the difficulties we find in complete inspira- 
tion with the comprehensive objection, that it prevents 
that constant reconstruction of religious truth which 
properly belongs to all times, and for which our own time 
is peculiarly ripe. If there is any one principle obvious 
in itself, and thoroughly enclosed in the laws of mind, a 
principle completely incorporated in the world about us, 
a principle that embraces all spiritual exhortation and 
scriptural motive, it is this very principle of religious 
progress, an unfolding of the minds and hearts of men 
toward God, a mastery in society of all divine impulses, 
a spreading abroad of the light and life of God till his 
kingdom is fully with us. But an inspiration that claims 
to give us anything like a perfect statement of truth, 
as contrasted with an inspiration that simply puts the 
mind, under its special powers and phases of development, 
in living contact with the truth, checks spiritual unfold- 
ing, and often holds us back from the divine ministration 
nearest to us. If the truths of the Bible, or any portion 
of its complex principles, are complete, if nothing can be 
added to them and nothing taken from them, then these 
truths must be known to us in this perfection, and no 



NATURALISM. 55 

longer remain to be inquired into. A verb'al statement 
that is absolute, but not understood, is a deceptive idea. 
Language owes its power to the meaning it imparts. 
Language that conveys no idea has no significance, and 
language that imperfectly conveys its idea is, to that 
degree, imperfect. If the doctrine of complete inspira- 
tion is to avail anything, we must accompany it with the 
assertion of our own power perfectly to measure the 
truth given us in the Scriptures, and, as its leading 
principles are there dealt with, to catch the breadth and 
fathom the depth of the divine mind. But if we contrast 
this bold statement with our feeble and contradictory 
attainments in knowledge, with the real insight of any 
body of theologians, it seems both foolish and profane. 
We have not yet seen that body of men who, collectively 
or singly, have had any right to plant themselves across 
the path of the divine word among men. It required a 
vision three times repeated to get the Apostle Peter out 
of the way of truth in a single, simple particular. 

We do not escape this dilemma by saying that the 
Scriptures are complete, but not completely understood. 
A perfection of this sort can subserve no purpose of 
authority. It is a perfection, by the very supposition, 
unverifiable, since it is not yet reached. The Bible is to 
us what we understand it to be, and no more. We are 
liable, by this sophistical "form of thought, to commit 
again that deep offence against reason — holding fast an 
untenable dogma by a trick of words. Truth must be left , 
in theory in that incomplete form in which we find it in 
practice, if we are to understand our duty under it, and 
our method of inquiry into it ; if we are to be led by 
the providence of God and by his growing revelation 
heavenward. We are in danger of throwing away the pres- 



$6 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

ent in favor of the past, of losing God's gifts to us by our 
veneration of his gifts to others, of building the tombs of 
the prophets and slaying the prophets themselves* 

The time has come in which the spiritual mind should 
turn from dogmas to facts — dogmas that have arisen from 
a speculative expansion of single, partial, and inadequate 
ideas, till, from a cloud the size of a man'$ hand, they 
have come to brood in darkness over the whole heavens ; 
facts in the physical and spiritual world, that are springing 
this very day with creative power from the mind of God, 
and, under the light of his revealing spirit, are laying 
open to us from a new and higher position the divine 
counsel. The time has come to turn from logical discus- 
sion to ethical law — discussion that has exhausted and 
frittered away in dissection the ideas it once contained; 
ethical law that is regnant in the world of thought and ac- 
tion as never before. This emigration from the old to the 
new, — an emigration that carries with it all the wealth 
of the past, an emigration that enters on the virgin fields 
that historic forces have prepared for us, — this emigration 
the growth of knowledge is forcing upon us, and in it the 
living energies of God are waiting to lead us. It is a 
fresh call as significant as that of Abraham. True science 
i^ natural theology, which runs before and behind, above 
and beneath, all theology ; that receives, as a dispersing 
atmosphere, the solid beams of light that enter it from 
without, and converts them into a genial, universal dis- 
closure of the things nearest to us. We have converted 
science, so far as we readily could, into an enemy by 
struggling with its conclusions, rejecting its corrections, 
and turning aside from its inspirations. If Christian think- 
ers had awakened with the day, and diligently sought all 
traces of God's presence, and of his moral government, in 



NATURALISM. 57 

the world, we should now be able to meet physical law 
with spiritual law, the outer perfection of form with the 
inner force of idea ; and God immanent in the world, the 
world, the immediate expression of Divine Being, would 
be convictions flowing in on us every moment, as the 
light of all our life. This is to be the issue, and we are 
delayed in attaining it because we will not let go the past, 
we will not accept the more perfect in place of the less 
perfect conception, we will not relax our hold on dogma— 
the hand already rigid in its desperate clutch — till it is 
wrenched from us ; and then we sink, many of us, into 
unbelief, like spent swimmers. 

There are two errors equally errors, though not equally 
false : the tendency to shape our lives by our beliefs, and 
the tendency to shape our beliefs by our lives. The first 
tendency is incipiently right, and shows its failure only 
later in its rigidity. The second is incipiently wrong, and, 
with a flickering of light here and there, walks into deeper 
and deeper darkness. While belief properly initiates life, it 
should be in constant action and reaction with it. Life 
should enlarge its truths, correct its errors, and lead it to 
higher and yet higher points of observation. A belief that 
runs in advance of life, and is not renewed by it, will 
either consume, with ascetic heat, many beautiful things, 
or maintain itself one side of real life, in dull denial of 
it. Thought and action must live by one process, in one 
household, if they are to live at all. 

If, in place of a supernatural inspiration, we accept an 
inspiration which is the immediate revelation of truth to 
the minds of men, a revelation that is human, because it 
is measured by the thoughts of men, which is divine, 
because it flows from the one fountain of truth and leads 
us to it, we shall have quite another view of the nature of 



58 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

duty, quite another disclosure of the path of ascent tow- 
ard God. So true is this, that very few are wilhng, 
even while asserting the absoluteness of religious truth, 
to afifirm the complete sufficiency of their own dogmas. 
Yet what less than this can they say to any purpose. If 
we are to be clear and coherent in our thought we must 
not hold on to absolute truth and progressive truth as 
parts of the same system. The absolute admits of no 
new light, no change of position ; the relative calls con- 
stantly for both. We must say of ourselves, in contrast 
with all men, we are right and they are wrong. 

Inquiry, if it proceeds, must be allowed to bring new 
construction to the entire system of truth. On no other 
terms is it appropriate. Nothing can remain intact except 
by an isolation that cuts it off from the living fellowship 
of faith. Growth must modify all that comes within its 
range. If" growth is applicable to religious truths, we 
must let it have its way among all religious conceptions. 
Duty ceases to be holding fast what we have, and consists, 
by means of it, in seeking what we have not yet attained. 
We are pressing forward toward the mark of the prize 
of our high calling in Christ Jesus. Our own discipline is 
sought by us, the world is of interest to us, the kingdom 
of heaven is ours, as all equally involving a movement 
forward under the truth and toward the truth. The 
use of truth in action, and the disclosure of ^truth in 
thought, become more and more one and the same 
expansive process, that allows no limits and accepts no 
delays. Duty is thus constantly the building of a new 
and larger kingdom within the mind and without it, an 
entering into fresh light, the rectification of conduct and 
character under it, and a reconstruction of personal, social, 
and civil relations in harmony with the enlarging spiritual 



NATURALISM. 5g 

Avorld. Thought and action He together at the Hving 
centre of growth, and this growth is not a process of 
private significance merely, but spreads abroad, far and 
wide, hke the buds of a tree, in the warm, glowing at- 
mosphere which belongs to the race of men, dealt with 
collectively by God. Duty thus becomes a new thing, a 
more divine thing. It is not keeping clean and consecrate 
a temple already built ; it is not holding fast an order 
already established ; it is helping to build a new temple 

. out of material just coming to light ; it is carrying forward 
insufficient terms of order toward that more perfect con- 
ception of which they are the rudiments ; it is w^orking 
with God and seeing God work with us, as cosmic terms 
take form under the divine purpose which they contain. 

^ Equally does the notion of inspiration, as the living 
presence of God with us, reinterpret life for us. Life has 
thus an integrity it cannot otherwise attain. There is no 
dead material in if ; certainly not in the higher ranges of 
truth. We understand, we feel, we obey, we live. We 
live, and in living we enlarge action, feeling, knowledge. 
The words of prophets and apostles are translucent terms 
in Revelation, giving color to the light, receiving color 
from it — genuine products of the movement to which they 
belong. We find in St. Paul deep convictions, glowing 
feelings, a spiritual nature profoundly moved by the 
truth, but we find in him no law laid upon us. We 
may share his life, because we share his liberty in it. 
Truth, as a mere abstraction, perishes in many minds, be- 
cause it fails really to enter them. It must perish in all 
minds that do not turn it into a personal experience. 

. What the cloud is to the sunlight, gathering it and glo- 
rifying it, that is the mind to the message of truth. It is 
living experiences that are the real terms of revelation. 



6o THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

Christ himself becomes an incarnation ; in his Hfe and 
action God gives a disclosure of divine love. The spir- 
itual distance between understanding a truth and the 
power to utter that truth is a finite one. He who can 
apprehend the words of apostles, could, standing, in the^ 
current of historic revelation, have uttered them. Reve- 
lation is this bringing of truth within the sweep of human 
thought, and human thought within the sweep of the truth. 
The highest minds, like the highest mountains, catch the 
Jight first, and reflect it longest ; but it is lost in inap- 
proachable space till these summits are touched by it. 
Down their slopes it glides rapidly, resting upon the 
entire plain. It is a strange inversion of thought to 
suppose that what the apostles could not grasp, may^yet 
become a revelation in the minds of their disciples ; that 
light may be present below, which has not been first 
present above. The integrity of our own lives, the integ- 
rity^of the lives of God's servants, must make the move- 
ment of the mind under the truth genuine, through and 
through, from inception to completion. 

What wisdom of exegesis comes to us the moment we 
direct the attention simply to the facts. The Old Testa- 
ment is apprehended only as it is interpreted historically. 
The principles it contains are to be judged as principles, 
and their growth through the ages gratefully recognized. 
This fact granted, we inquire at our leisure, and with 
perfect safety of thought, into the precise circumstances 
which attended on their utterance. The truth of princi- 
ple, the one invaluable things is surely with us, and needs 
no confirmation beyond itself. 

We often have hard work, in the confidence of hope, to 
hold fast immortality. Is it not because religion is with 
us, to such a degree, a supernatural revelation, and not, 



NATURALISM. 6l 

what it might be, a personal experience, native to the 
world about us? We hold it as a relatively alien thing on 
outside authority, and not as indigenous life sealed in our 
own spirits. So far as we are full of spiritual life, we 
shall have no doubt of immortality. Confidence, push, 
buoyant power, belong to life, and compel it to take pos- 
session of its own field. The spirit, instinct with life, will 
assert that life, and stretch upward toward immortality in 
its fulfilment. If life is weak, the sense of immortality^ 
must sink w^ith it. 

This belief in God, as ever and equally with us, gives 
us also a new view of his method of work. The kingdom 
of heaven is not delayed as a matter of divine counsel, it 
is pushed forward as rapidly as its own nature and the 
mastery it must win over the hearts of men will allow. 
There is a true evolution in the spiritual world, a passage 
from darkness into light, a birth of the higher and holier 
in the region of the lower and less pure, a slow shaping 
of all the conditions of life to life, till it is made domi- 
nant within and without. This movement is, front be- 
ginning to end, a living process, a self-conscious progress, 
an iijner triumph of pure reason, pure love, and one which 
cannot, therefore, for an instant, in any part of it, be 
thrown off its own rational centre. Its haste is an inner 
fervor, its fervor a growing conviction, its conviction the 
unfolding of truth within the soul itself by its own expe- 
rience. To this end God is pouring his own life into the 
hearts of men as rapidly as they can, or they will, receive 
it. The whole process is life fed by life, and this divine 
gestation cannot shorten its own periods. The light of 
reason waits on it, and would at once be turned into 
darkness and death by any violence done to it. Any 
touch pf force is violence, and nothing is life but the lib- 






'62 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

erty of the spirit. The length of time it takes us to 
understand this fact is only another enforcement of our 
lesson that progress is a thing of growth. 

The historic flood is let in ; the wheels of motion are 
all spinning under it. What has been done, what shall 
be done, are, one and all, a continuous creation, a grow- 
ing dawn, a revelation that cannot stop, or retreat on itself, 
or be at strife with itself, or be pushed beyond itself. A 
pagan dispensation, a Jewish dispensation, a Christian 
dispensation, are stages in the free, yet irresistible, uni- 
versal coming of the kingdom of heaven ; the fruit of a 
movement they do not measure ; stars that, ushering in 
the day, are swallowed up by it. We may say, in the 
rapt spirit of the apostles : ** For all things are yours, i 
whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, 
or death, or things present, or things to come ; all are 
yours ; and ye are Christ's ; and Christ is God's.'' 

W^e have thus a more just sense of the momentum and 
majesty of the divine movement. It spreads over the 
whole earth and through all years ; it gathers together 
in one all things, whether in heaven or on earth. It is 
not a flash of light, a sudden flush in the sky, it is the day I 
breaking in all spaces. God is immanent in the universe, 
the miracle of creation is every moment repeated. Light 
is everywhere issuing from darkness ; order from chaos. 
The kingdom of heaven is rising up clear, sweet, imper- 
turbable, into the Divine Presence. The authority of this j 
revelation is ample, the only ample authority — the fact j 
that the earth and the heavens are meeting each other ' 
and embracing each other, in all the ministrations of life, 
through the whole stretch of vision. 

We should understand how thoroughly the instruction 
of God is object-teaching. The world of facts lies under 



NATURALISM. - 63 

the world of ideas, its serene reflection, its stable form. 
If we are redeemed, saved, purified ; redemption, salvation, 
purification are not dogmatic assertions, dull text, they 
are visible facts, brilliant illuminations, whose beauties we 
hourly^xperience. We cannot have a philosophy of life, 
a spiritual interpretation of life, which does not issue in 
life itself. Are Christians saved? And if so, how are 
they saved ? These are most pungent and pertinent 
questions, and are to be answered on this side and on 
that, in inner force and outer form, in full view of the facts 
of the world and of the ideas regnant in it. History, 
with its vices, virtues, decay, reform, littleness and large- 
ness of spiritual life, lies as a map before us, that we may 
find our own whereabouts,- and our lines of rnarch in the 
divine plan. He that has eyes to see, let him see ; and 
he must see the clearest wisdom of God in the events that 
are nearest him, the foreground of his picture. Mirage, 
illusion, are always at play on the horizon. We must Vv^alk 
with the omniscience of God where that omniscience 
is most immediate to us, in our own lives. This is 
inspiration. If we put inspiration, as a gift, far back 
among the servants of God, we put it far off from our 
own thoughts. Our lives are the types of all lives, and 
should be richer than the lives of those who have gone 
before us, because we are higher up in the mount of 
vision. 

Js then the truth^the truth which fills the universe of 
God, as a trumpet made for its proclamation ; the truth 
which is the breath of every living spirit, the invisible 
presence that moves creatively on the face of the waters, 
that otherwise surge aimlessly and darkly in the social 
world ; is then the truth so inferior and insufficient, that 
we need something other than it, called Revelation, to 



64 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

take its place, and do its work ? Nay, indeed. Christ 
is the way and the truth and the hfe ; and this life is the 
light of men, the true light that lighteth every man that 
Cometh into the world. With him we abide livingly and 
lovingly among divine things. What God is to one he is to 
all, and, in a profound sense, equally to all. Our inspira- 
tion is the inspiration which God has poured out from the 
beginning, like sunshine and rain, for the fertilization of 
all fields, and whose creative touch we to-day enjoy as 
never before. 

We accept then that view of inspiration which makes it 
stand for the normal hold of the human mind on truth, 
under all the liabilities and limitations which belong to its 
powers. In this process of truth-finding, truth-feeding, 
God is pre-eminently near us, helping our thoughts from 
within and from without ; especially is he near to us in 
our approach to those higher truths which are revelations 
in the deeper world of spiritual being. We so earnestly 
and urgently reject the more familiar doctrine of inspira- 
tion, not because it does not aver for most minds a fact 
of great moment, but because it has come to be used as a 
key to a dogmatic structure, a wedge that, driven to its 
place, holds firm the entire edifice of theological thought ; 
that greatly needs to be rebuilt by us. There is a lazy 
love of authority and finality that we all, more or less, 
share ; but he who places his hand in the hand of God to 
be led of him must be up by times, take many weary 
steps, and find himself in many obscure places. Yet thus 
there is safety, and thus there is strength. We are ready 
to strive for this liberty, to walk with God. 

It has been necessary to urge at length, and in the very 
outset, these difficulties of inspiration, because only thus 
could we be fully restored to naturalism, God's universal 



NATURALISM.. 65 

method of dealing with men, those safe, sober paths of 
thought and action in which he daily leads us. The doc- 
trine of inspiration, standing at the entrance of inquiry 
into religious truth, settling its method, and assigning its 
peculiar tests, forbade any sound naturalism in faith, and 
threw the mind at once into a conflict with knowledge 
and the growth of knowledge, which spring from the deep, 
fertile soil of natural and spiritual law. We could not 
otherwise so much as open our inquiry, or open a way to 
it. The New Theology is involved in this very move- 
ment toward more breadth and more unity in all truth, 
this identification and integrity of method in all worlds. 

If now we accept all truth as resting flatly and fully on 
its own laws, it may be thought that we have escaped one 
difficulty in harmonizing religion with nature only to 
encounter another and greater one. Can prayer also be 
made to stand on the basis of law? Are miracles only 
manifestations of uniform methods? We wish to give 
ourselves to no feats of interpretation, feats that over- 
»strain and destroy the truth they are intended to present. 
Our naturalism is not a naturalism of physical laws simply. 
We do not in the least accept the dictum of Huxley that 
" the progress of science has in all ages meant, and now 
means more than ever, the extension of the province of 
what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant 
gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of 
what we call spirit and spontaneity." Quite the reverse 
of this, knowledge, wasdom seems to us to be the extension 
and reconciliation of both these primary terms of thought, 
till they interlace each other in every part of a universe 
that w^as dead and is alive. 

Prayer is in harmony, wholly in harmony, with spiritual 
law. If there is any universal method which belongs to 
5 



66 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

the feeble, dependent human mind, it is this method ,of 
asking anxi giving aid. So incorporate is , prayer in the 
constitution of man, that he cannot but pray. He nlay 
close his lips, but his heart remains full of it, under any 
exigency. But if it is a law of mind to seek help, it 
must, with a theistic interpretation of the world, become a 
fixed portion of a rational method to bestow help. The 
asking and the receiving are cohiplementary under one 
set of powers. If it is a law of mind to think, thought 
must be a factor in success. If it is a law of the affections 
to seek sympathy, it is equally a law to confer it. No 
construction of the spiritulil world could be more unequal 
and incongruous than a prayerless one, or one of un- 
answered prayer. This would be to give and withhold in 
the same act; to confer powers, and repress their exercise. 
As a matter of fact, the affections owe a vigorous, free, 
enjoyable life to this, very act of prayer. We must hold 
by things as they are. This is empiricism. It is no part 
of our philosophy to believe that the world is wholly 
different from that which it offers itself to us as being. 
We leave such conclusions to theorists. 

But prayer, if it strengthens and sustains the mind, ^ 
ought to find, and does find, entrance thereby into the 
physical world. As long as mind is a term of energy in 
that world, a mental effect may become a physical one ; 
and prayer may be an agency whose action is present 
among physical events. Prayer is thus certain to extend 
at least an indirect influence over current circumstances. 

Nor is it opposed to true naturalism to believe that 
prayer may meet with avdirect answer in the modification 
of physical things. In the naturalism of the world, as we 
understand it, mental processes and powers hold a certain 
supremacy among physical forces. To understand the 



NATURALISM. 6/ 

conditions of control, and control itself, is the very gist of 
naturalism. That God should aid wise endeavor, no more 
throws us off the basis of endeavor than does the response 
of our fellow-creatures to our petitions. Prayer may be 
used to weaken effort, and so may it be used to strengthen 
it. Wisely used, it leaves unaltered the laws of action, — 
the physical and spiritual naturalism which envelops it. 
It certainly marks a peculiar feature of that naturalism, 
and in that feature we supremely believe. It is not easy 
to overrate the force of sympathetic, spiritual life. 

If it be said that prayer, as effecting direct results 
among physical things, is, if possible, incapable of proof, 
we at once demur. It is, indeed, incapable of sensuous 
proof, but not of proof. It is contrary to the conditions 
of the problem to demand sensuous proof. If the answer 
of prayer were established in this way, it would become a 
miracle ; and a miracle stands in very different spiritual 
relations. Prayer subserves primarily a sympathetic, 
rational purpose. On that basis, there is ample evidence 
of the answer of prayer in the lives of many millions. 
On that basis, its answer must rest ; for only thus can it 
reach its object of ministering to faith. To try to push it 
from its own pivot of revolution, and test it as a naked, 
physical fact, is to lift the magnetic needle from its rest, 
and still insist on its vibration. It is quite sufficient if 
physical events, rendered in a sensuous way, do not con- 
tradict the answers of prayer ; the spiritual energy that 
accompanies them must always remain spiritual, as much 
so as the energy of mind. 

So in turn the typical miracle, as the miracles of Christ, 
is wholly in keeping with naturalism. The miracles of 
our Lord are the highest expression of the fundamental 
fact pf naturalism, the interpenetration of physical laws 



68 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

and mental processes, the triumph of reason through the 
entire realm of being. The miracles of healing were 
wrought under, not by, natural laws, and left those, so 
renovated, on precisely the same plane of physical forces 
on which it found them. The gifts of these miracles were 
chiefly spiritual. The physical gains were soon lost 
again, if the living impulse of divine love — an impulse so 
native to the highest development of the human spirit — 
was not felt. The miracle of help is no more abnormal, 
no more subversive of a true naturalism, coming on fitting 
occasion from the hand pf God, than is the assistance by 
which one restores his neighbor, who has fallen in the road, 
to his feet. 

The feeling of opposition between the wisely ordered 
miracle and natural law arises from the very narrow limits 
we put upon naturalism, as the uniformity of physical 
sequences, clamped close within themselves. Any modi- 
fication of these mechanical terms is their breakage. 
Accept a true theism, a theism which puts personal 
reason — we say personal reason, though reason is the very 
essence of personality — at the very centre of all' things; 
a theism which makes reason, as the cohesive law of 
thought, as wide as thought itself ; a connection of cre- 
ation as pervasive as creation itself, and there is no dam- 
age done the lower by the rule of the higher over it. 
When it prevails as uniformity, and when it prevails as 
an exception, the fact is equally one of reason. The 
miracle is only a more marked expression of a relation 
that is prevalent everywhere. The miracles of Christ aid 
us in comprehending the world ; they do not alter its con- 
struction, of our permanent standing in reference to it. 
Instead of discord and disproportion, there are the highest 
harmony,, the widest naturalism, the most manifest asser* 



NATURALISM. 69 

tion of the most fundamental fact, the omnipresence of 
reason. What limits reason shall assign itself, is an 
empirical lesson of the Divine Reason addressed to the 
reason of man. 

We have the firmest faith in naturalism, but no patience 
with a naturalism that takes the most narroAV and inflex- 
ible term in our complex experience, and sets it up as the 
absolute type of all terms. We are pleading for the 
naturalism of reason, and not of causation built up by 
reason against itself. We refuse to chisel an idol, and then 
bow down to it. In a stony presence of this kind, all 
spiritual life is petrified. There is no iconoclasm in which 
we are more hearty than that which breaks down the 
images of the senses set up in the temple of reason. We 
believe in God, and the laws that he has framed cannot, 
beyond their own uses, stand against him. We accept 
reason, and all the claims of reason, but that reason should 
subject itself to its own products is not among these 
claims. The denial of the fitness of a miracle is the 
abrogation of reason in behalf of physical laws, when life 
has been allowed to sink out of them, till they have 
become the dead, inflexible, crust of things. Spiritual 
life in all its terms perishes under such a process. Reani- 
mate law once more with the living reason it contains, 
and it regains at once flexibility and submits itself to all 
the uses of life. 

' It may still be felt that the inflexibility of physical law 
is a simple, well-established fact of experience, and that a 
fact cannot be pushed aside by a reason. But has this 
inflexibility been established ? Certainly it has been 
established, as the fruit of reason, if it has been established 
at all. It is not a matter of sensation. The problem 
much transcends our experience. We are brought back 



70 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

then once more to reason, and it is just as much within 
the scope of reason to recognize the inflexibihty of physi- 
cal laws under^purely physical terms and their flexibility 
under spiritual terms as it is simply to assert their absolute 
uniformity. We abide with reason, and we must have 
reasons, the gold currency of mind, for what is offered in 
the name of reason. All turns on the true key of thought 
in the world. We believe that reason unlocks itself and 
^\ unlocks all things, that its law is within itself, that the 
final term in light is light itself. Mind, whose office is 
exposition, expounds both matter and mind. Matter, the 
. relatively opaque and passive element, does not measure 
mind, the relatively transparent and active element. Mind 
cannot be allowed to perish in its own presence by its 
own processes in deference to conceptions that are its own 
creation. 

The miracle, as the expression of the supreme term in 
the cosmos, may easily break bounds, has often broken 
bounds, in men's thoughts. But so may every trace of 
order, dependent on man's conception of it, be effaced or 
confused. Superstitions are the ugly, ravelled fringe of 
spiritual life. Life, the more extended it is in its field, 
the more delicate in its processes, is but the more liable to 
these miserable perversions of its own growth. In this 
relation the miracle is akin to what we find everywhere. 
We scale the heights of being by a complexity and balance 
of action of most unstable equilibrium, at the farthest 
possible remove from the stolid dependencies of mechan- 
ism. The checks and counter-checks of thought are not 
to discourage us by their multiplicity and subtilty, if we 
are to make ourselves heirs of the Infinite. Who can tell 
how the bird rides the wind, and who can sufficiently 
define the poise of the spirit between physical and spiritual 
things ! When w^e consider the patience with which, in 



NATURALISM. 7I 

spite of all flutter and feebleness of wing, the mind of man 
has pushed, and is pushing, its way upward jnto the region 
of spiritual life, how empty of authority do the vigorous 
words seem by which Positivism represses this spirit, and 
bids it back again to the earth. '^ History will place your 
dogma in its class, above or below kindred competing 
dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his species. 
From being a conviction it will sink into a curiosity ; 
from being the guide to millions of human lives it will 
dwindle down into a chapter in a book. As history 
explains your dogma so science will dry it up ; the com- 
peting law will silently make the conception of the daily 
miracle of your altars seem impossible ; the mental climate 
will gradually deprive your symbols of their nourishment, 
and men will turn their backs on your system, not because 
they have confuted it, but because, like witchcraft or 
astrology, it has ceased to interest them.""^ 

This passage vividly describes a most real movement, 
that by which the chaff is winnowed from the w^heat — 
error eliminated from truth. But when the author expects 
to find only seed wheat, and all of it, in his own sieves, 
the totality of truth among his own convictions, we are 
astonished at the insight and the lack of insight which his 
words convey. We must have both the harvest of thought 
and the gleaning of all its fields before we can fill our 
granaries, and turn the key on our treasures. We have 
room for physical things, and room for spiritual things, 
and room for their mutual corrections ; we have room for 
the gathering of the senses, and room for the touch of 
insight which turns it into the musical rhythm of thought. 
The wind with which John Morley proposes to clean our 
threshing-floor would prove a veritable cyclone driving 
away not the chaff, simply, but the grain of thought so 
'••John Morley, " Miscellanies," vol. i., p. Si. 



*J2 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

far won in our intellectual culture. We must, indeed, 
admit the energies of reform ; they will certainly force 
their own entrance, as intimated, but we must not allow 
them to reform away, nor will they reform away, the very 
substance of life to which alone they are made to minister. 
What men have been doing from the beginning, that, from 
the nature of the case, they must continue to do to the 
very end ; though they may, indeed, do it in a more 
complete way. No subsoiling can be so deep as to plough 
the very ground from under us. Spiritual germs are 
waiting extension, not extermination. 

All that we have now occasion to enforce is the simple 
fact, that there is not, necessarily, in the miracle any 
conflict with naturalism, as a law of rational action. The 
nature of the supernatural — for it has a nature — and its 
relation to naturalism remain to be considered. 

But it may be said, if we believe so profoundly in the 
supernatural, why have we been so urgent in our attack 
on inspiration? How can two walk together, unless they 
are agreed ? The supernatural element, retained in in- 
spiration, puts constant suspension and harmful limitation 
on naturalism, on reason, on the growth of mind under its 
own laws. The instant the spirit strives to move forward, 
in the highest realm of thought, it encounters this dogma, 
and is often turned peremptorily back by it. The glass 
in which, with open face, we behold the glory of God, and 
are changed into the same image from glory to glory, is 
that habitual reflection of him which we know as natural- 
ism. We object to the ordinary view of inspiration, not 
because it involves supernaturalism, but because it stands 
in obscure, perplexing, and misleading relations with natu- 
ralism, the coherent method of God. We exclude this 
dogma in the interests of a true reconciliation of the 
double terms of being. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE SUPERNATURAL. 

There is no question of religious thought more difficult 
or more urgent than that involved in the nature and real- 
ity of the supernatural. We may dispense with this in- 
quiry, as we may dispense with any inquiry, by a belief 
or an unbelief that only partially understands its own 
grounds. If, however, the world of facts and the world 
of spiritual experiences are to assume anything like a 
clear and consistent expression for us, we must settle in 
our minds the limits and relations of the natural and the 
supernatural. 

Religion, in all its forms, has had and must have to 
do, and that very freely, with the supernatural. A faith 
without the supernatural — if we should still insist on call- 
ing it a faith — could gain no hold on the general mind. 
Religion ordinarily does mean, and ought to mean, our 
belief in personal, spiritual agents ; our relation to the 
problem of spiritual life. If any behef short of this is 
called a religion, it is so called because it has taken the 
place of religion, and we wish to give it, in its difficult 
and unnatural position, what prestige and support we can. 
What especially distinguishes religious faith from all other 
forms of faith is, that it lays hold on an invisible personal 
element, and assigns it some part in the world, no matter 
how obscure and partial that part may be. Such personal 

73 



74 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 



powers are, from the very nature of the case, supernatural, 
and their devotees are only too ready to accept any super- 
natural manifestation of their presence. 

No faith can properly be called a religion which does 
not introduce the mind to this invisible world. However 
we may choose to employ words, there is nothing plainer 
than that a belief which accepts invisible spiritual factors 
will be so distinct from one that denies them as properly 
to belong to a peculiar class. Religions all agree in this 
assertion, and differ among themselves only in the charac- 
ter and control of these superhuman beings. These 
spirits, one and all, are found in the closest afifiliation 
with the supernatural, and when they manifest themselves 
through the natural, it is made thereby to stand in differ- 
ent relations from those we ordinarily recognize in it. It 
is infused with a power and employed for a purpose 
which quite transcend it as cosmic mechanism. 

Religious thought is especially liable to drop into su- 
perstition, to become wayward and fantastic in belief, 
and dangerous and fanatical in action, at this point of 
supernatural intervention. No definition is, therefore, 
more urgent for religion itself than this which defines 
the relation of the visible and the invisible in the 
government of human life. This is the problem which 
every form of faith that aims in any degree to be rational 
must work over, again and again, in connection with our 
increasing knowledge of the world. It is time that the 
ignorance which once might have been winked at should 
pass away. The entire inductive growth of religious 
truth and life lies here. New methods, fresh corrections 
and restraints, are brought to belief by a better mastery 
of the natural, and a better apprehension of the limits it 
assigns the supernatural. Thus, on the practical and 






THE SUPERNATURAL. 75 

the theoretical side alike, the one thing to be correctly 
fathomed in faith, the one thing to be wisely applied in 
conduct, is the inner and abiding relation of spirit and 
form, substance and expression, the Divine Being and the 
divine mode of being. Is the form form through and 
through ? Is the physical physical to its very core ? Is the 
natural dead by means of laws that have no purpose or 
constructive idea ; that neither arise, nor can carry the 
mind, beyond themselves ? These are questions which 
reason, because of its own life, cannot fail to ask, nor can 
it fail to be profoundly affected by the answers given 
them. The religious tendency — a tendency native to 
thought — is always struggling for a supernatural some- 
thing of the nature of spirit, which lies back of, above, and 
beyond, all the sensible terms of our experience. 

The scientific tendency, later in its development, leads 
us to magnify the natural, and, in its extreme expression, 
to exclude with it the supernatural. The terms of exact 
knowledge lie chiefly in physical things and events, bound 
together as causes and effects. The extension of these 
relations is the expansion of determinate thought, and all 
the successes of the past century urge us to complete the 
work by giving full sweep to the ruling idea. This move- 
ment has, for the moment, gathered great momentum, 
and those who wish to put any restraints upon it, or sup- 
plement it by earlier forms of inquiry, are easily pushed 
aside, or looked upon as having scant claims even to this 
courtesy. 

While there have arisen many secondary points of dis- 
cussion between religion and science, points at which 
science has been more frequently in the right, the real 
difficulty of reconciliation between the two methods of 
thought is found in this very thing, the supernatural. 



*j6 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

Science has an instinctive disrelish for the supernatural, as 
something in whose presence its own methods are of no 
avail, something from which there goes forth an obscur- 
ing, chilling mist of uncertainty, that brings inquiry 
speedily to an end. The supernatural, instead of being an 
essential term ill a higher order, is felt to be a loss of all 
order in chaos and confusion. The controversy, there- 
fore, between science and religion, our knowledge of the 
physical world and our knowledge of the spiritual world, 
can only^be settled by a just definition of the natural and 
supernatural, and by a determination of their dependence 
on each other. If reason excludes either, we cannot know 
the fact too quickly ; if both are to be gathered up in one 
universe, this is a primary truth in human knowledge. 

It is hardly necessary to add that our successful hand- 
ling of the world as a whole must turn on our recon- 
ciliation, either by exclusion, or by subordination, or by 
concurrence in a result more comprehensive than either 
alone can offer, of these two terms, form and spirit, 
matter and mind, the natural and the supernatural. We 
can in no other way reach the power and the peace of our 
own lives. The questions. What are the aims of life ? Is 
life worth living? are so frequently raised, and so variously 
answered, because we have been losing the' harmonious 
, stroke of the. two wings by which we -rise, and ride on the 
impalpable atmosphere of the spiritual world.' In conse- 
quence, we have revolved helplessly in it, or plunged 
fatally from it. 

What then are the natural and the supernatural? If 
we can satisfactorily distinguish these two things in their 
own nature, we shall easily understand the part they play 
in' the universe, and readily furnish the proof on which 
they jest. There is very general consent as to what is to 



I 



THE SUPERNATURAI.. 'J'J 

be understood by the natural, in its narrow signification. 
It covers all things and events which are interlocked by 
causal relations — phenomena that are settled in their form 
and order of procedure. Every purely .physical occur- 
rence is completely conditioned by coexistent and ante- 
cedent circumstances, and it is these fixed dependencies 
which constitute its nature. However variable this nature 
may seem to be, the appearance is deceptive, for all re- 
sults are perfectly defined by the energies involved. Here 
is a conception so distinct and final as to claim, on our 
part, clear recognition. As to this central phase of the 
natural, there should be no confusion or doubt. It is a 
form of being without degrees and vanishing lines. The 
entire physical world conforms to the conception. 

But do all events come under these unchangeable rela- 
tions ? Most assuredly not. To present at once the 
nearest and strongest example of another law, thought 
cannot be regarded as natural in this narrow meaning ofx 
the word. If it is, in any sense, natural, it is so in a 
higher and wider way. It is natural simply as provided 
for in the framework of things, and habitually associated 
with it, and not as itself a constituent term enclosed in it. 
This use of the word is so much more extended than the 
previous one, in the connections implied, that nothing but 
confusion can arise if we do not carefully mark the widen- 
ing of meaning when we include both sets of facts under 
one term. - It is fatal to the higher relations of thought 
to crowd them in with the lower ones of physical events ; 
or it loosens the lower ones at once to include with them 
the wider phenomena. The essential connection, in the 
one case, is causation, and, in the other, that of spon- 
taneous procedure under the laws of truth. The laws of 
truth are not involved as forces in facts, but imply the 



78 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

conformity of the mind, under its own insight, to the im- 
palpable thought-relations of things. This conformity is 
established by the mind itself, and therefore the mind is 
and must be free in pursuing it. No search for truth, 
that is not deceptive, can be entered on without this 
spontaneous, self-directed movement. No conformity can 
be established between our conclusions and the facts to 
which they pertain without accompanying insight, and 
the action of the mind under it. If truth seems to elude 
us, we must be able to pursue it. If it is a certain some- 
thing addressed to the mind alone, then the mind must 
have powers and laws — those of thought — in reference to 
it. All that declares human freedom declares also this 
special relation of thoughts within themselves. It is 
sufficient, however, to insist on one thing, and that one 
thing is so conclusive as to render absolutely inadmis- 
sible the extension of causation to all processes. To 
affirm that thoughts have the same causal relations as 
things is to destroy truth, and is, therefore, a self-de- 
structive affirmation. If our judgments are interwoven 
with the forces that impel the physical world, with the 
fixed connections that control it, then each and every 
judgment, as a simple fact, must, like other facts, have 
a sufficient cause ; and all judgments must have one and 
the same right to be, that of being ; that of inclusion in 
the nature of things. No judgment can be opposed to 
any other judgment as true or false ; all are equally real, { 
equally the product of adequate causes, equally included j 
in the framework of the world. If, as Huxley affirms, 
consciousness '^ is a function of nervous matter, when : 
that nervous matter has attained a certain degree of or- 
ganization,'' we shall be utterly unable to define that 
peculiar relation of thoughts — themselves subtile products 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 79 

of causation — to the other products of causation, which 
we term truth. 

The distinction between the true and the false must 
disappear, and that between the real and the unreal 
take its place. If one strives to restore the conception 
of truth as the correspondence of judgments with the 
reality of things, he must mean by the reality of things, 
not the actuality of things, — for our thoughts are only the 
counterparts of the intellectual relations expressed by 
things, and never a reproduction of the things themselves, 
— but certain supersensible connections involved in them. 
But how involved? Certainly not as any form of phe- 
nomena, but only as the possible interpretation of the 
phenomena. This possibility is outside of causation, 
something put upon it by mind, and by mind alone. 
Here, then, we have a triple separation of the movement 
of thoughts from the movement of things. It is toward 
an idea and not toward an event — it is not the very act of 
thought, but the intellectual product of the thought, that 
interests us. This distinction of results lies in the realm of 
the true and the false, and not in that of the real and the 
unreal. The result itself is one of immediate, conscious 
conformity, and not one of prior, unconscious determina- 
tion. The search for truth must be a conscious one, 
since truth is a visible agreement, under insight. Events, 
merely, gain nothing by consciousness, since the forces 
which settle them lie deeper than consciousness and are 
incapable of independent modification in it. 

If mind is under natural, causal law, truth is three 
times lost. It is lost in fact, as the only question be- 
comes one of realities. It is lost in theory, as there is 
nothing other than mere facts to which the thoughts, 
themselves mere facts, can conform. There are no addi- 



80 ' THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

tional facts, called truths, to which the process of develop- 
ment can bend. And truth, if granted in theory, is lost 
in attainment, since we can give no reason why a series of 
thoughts produced by one series of causes should conform 
to a series of relations expressed by other facts, under 
their own independent lines of causation. Causes can only 
reach facts, and those of a predetermined order. Truths 
must themselves be phenomenal characteristics, if they 
are to be included in phenomena ; while the method of 
coincidence remains entirely unintelligible. 

We must stanchly deny, therefore, that thoughts are 
causal, contained in nature, in its limited sense. They 
are rather, in their origin, supernatural: since they play 
upon nature from above for its interpretation in physical 
and spiritual uses. Their laws are laws of their own, and 
their conformity to them is achieved by a higher impulse 
than physical forces. 

If we look at the way in which the two terms, thoughts 
and things, are united, the same conclusion is forced 
upon us by another method. This junction is accom- 
plished by intervention of the brain. The processes 
which take place in this highly organized organ, an organ 
which contains the most delicate, varied, complex, mobile, 
and dependent forms of activity anywhere found in the 
physical world, are purely physical, and have their types 
in methods elsewhere present. Brain action presents a 
closed circle of forces that run through a familiar circuit 
within themselves. The energies that are realized in de- 
composition are expended in motion, heat, recomposition. 
There is in this expenditure no known term that takes 
the form of thought or feeling. These are incidents, not 
facts, of the process. Thought has no phenomenal ex- 
pression which it can take, side by side with physical 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 8l 

activities. No one of these is the equivalent of thought, 
transmutable into it, or capable of being restored from it. 
Thought remains a perfectly intangible accompaniment - 
of these tangible terms. Brain constituents, in their con- 
sumption, do not give it, nor can it return to the form of 
these constituents. On the other hand, these issue in their 
own equivalents, wholly aside from thought. In discus- 
sing brain action within its own circle of composition 
and decomposition, we have no more occasion to consider 
thoughts and feelings beyond the nervous activity inci- 
dent to them, than we have, in making up the product of 
expenditures in a steam-engine, to estimate the play of 
shadows ; or the mind of the operator in computing the 
waste of a telegraphic circuit. 

Thought does attend, or may attend, on these physical 
activities, complete within themselves in the brain and 
body of man. The amount of thought will stand in close 
relation to the volume of movement, but the nature of 
thought as thought will not determine the nature of the 
nervous activity, nor the nature of the nervous activity de- 
cide that of the thought. Slow, inaccurate, and perplexed 
thinking will consume brain energy as certainly as rapid, 
correct, and ready apprehension. Thought on one subject 
will involve essentially the same changes — not perhaps ab- 
solutely identical ones in the parts of the brain affected — 
as thought on a very different subject. The divisions of 
thought, so far as they reappear in distinctions of nervous 
action, do it under perfectly disparate terms. What is a 
mental difference here is a local one there. The brain 
thus takes, in reference to the mind, the position of an 
instrument which both limits and aids the mind, and has x) 
many degrees of aptness in reference to it. Yet it no 
more determines the direction an.d pjerfection of execu- 



82 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

tion than do the tools of the carpenter the form and 
success of his work. 

The superior and supersensible relation of the mind, in 
spite of the closeness and constancy of its dependence on 
the brain, — yet not closer or more constant than that of the 
telegrapher on his instrument — is anticipated and typified 
in that intermediate term between matter and mind 
which we call life. It is not merely brain, but the living 
brain, which is the organ of thought. So unable have 
those been, who are striving to give a fixed interpretation, 
under physical forms, to all parts of the world, to find any 
satisfactory exposition of life, or place for it in their sys- 
tem, that some of the most able and sharp-sighted of 
them all, like Professor Huxley, have denied its exist- 
ence as an entity of any sort. The physical terms of the 
living thing are complete within it, and fully cover the 
phenomena before us. Life finds no place among them 
as one of them. It is thought, therefore, to be an un- 
warranted act of mind to create for it another position on 
another plane, above them or back of them, and enthrone 
it thereon as a supersensuous presence. The living circle, 
sufficient unto itself, needs only itself for its compre- 
hension. 

By this method of thought the very notion of compre- 
hension, the reference of phenomena to something deeper 
than themselves, is set aside. Each step in the dance is 
a simple mechanical fact ; the entire dance is made up 
of these distinct steps', therefore the form and rhythm of 
the whole are sufficiently covered by the exposition of the 
parts. It IS possible to say this in reference to life, because 
life declares itself only in and by these intertwined circuits 
of molecular and atomic movement, this dance of the 
dbmejitsu It is not possible to say it in reference to mind, 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 83 

• — though exactly the same reasons lead us to wish to say 
it — because the wholly distinct phenomena of mind in 
consciousness declare the presence of something in addition 
to all physical facts. Yet these mental phenomena find 
no more place among the physical terms which accompany 
them, than does life among organic functions. In both 
cases, a result addressed to the mind, is made the ground 
of inferring a corresponding agency. 

If we hold that a certain series of physical facts mani- 
fest themselves in an additional way as a series of mental 
phenomena, we must also hold, under the notion of causa- 
tion, that these phenomena are the expression of those 
physical forces, and stand on terms of transfer with them. 
Not only are these conclusions subversive of the very 
nature of truth, and therefore to be summarily rejected 
by the truth-loving temper, they find no confirmation in 
our knowledge of nervous facts, and bring no light to our 
thinking. It is as impossible to discover thought in the 
brain economy, as it is impossible to pick up life in our 
anatomy of physical organs. Thought may easily enough 
be said to be a specific, higher form of life. Yet these 
heroic assertions we have chosen to make not only sweep 
aside the habitual methods of mind, they do nothing 
whatever for us, unless it be regarded a solution of the 
problem to abolish the problem itself ; an explanation of 
differences to deny their existence. 

If the distinctive phenomena of life do not establish life 
as a real agent, then the peculiar phenomena of mind do 
not give us mind as a spiritual entity. Thus mental 
activity sinks at once into a mere succession of phenomena. 
Our earnest affirmations, our sharp denials, our indignation, 
our ardent vindication, are either mere appearances, or 
are determined by something quite other than themselves. 



84 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

If there were the least philosophy left in us by such 
a philosophy, which there well enough may not be, we 
should be content simply to watch these shadows of clouds 
pursuing each other across the intellectual landscape. We 
must, then, start our philosophy with the validity of truth ; 
and this is found only in the integrity of the mind itself, 
in the coherence and justness of its own processes, in the- 
essential soundness of knowledge. 

Here, then, in mind, we have something obviously 
supernatural ; indeed, the very term which leads us to 
entertain the notion of the supernatural, and make use of 
it in our processes of thought. What can be a better 
image of the supernatural, something above nature, as a 
closed circuit, and in free use of it in spite of its closure^ 
than mind? An engineer is watching his engine in 
reference to correction. When he shall strike in, how he 
shall strike in, whether he shall strike in at all, are points 
he is waiting to determine. Whatever change he makes, 
takes its appropriate place in the circle of physical con- 
ditions, and the outcome of them all is altered by it. 
This involves a supernatural presence, not a power de- 
tached from the natural and alien to it, not a power 
included within the natural and bound by it, but a power 
that from its own resources works on and through the 
natural, and by its labor brings forth within the natural 
fresh returns for itself. The moment the inquirer recog- 
nizes the truth-seeking, truth-obeying processes for what 
they are, he holds the secret of the supernatural. 

Confusion frequently arises in the discussion of evolution 
because of the different degrees of force which are assigned 
the word. It may imply that each succeeding state is 
wholly included in the preceding one, or only that they 
are closely united to each other, the former with its full 






THE SUPERNATURAL. 85 

quota of work passing into the latter. A narrower and 
a wider meaning, in a similar way, attach to naturalism. 
We may mean by it conclusively causal relations, or we 
may include in it the whole empirical system of which we 
are a part, with its intellectual as well as its physical terms. 
When, in our first chapter, we affirmed naturalism, we ex- 
pressly gave it this wide meaning ; now, when we contrast 
it with supernaturalism, accepting the latter also, we assign 
it its narrower signification. It is not easy to avoid the 
double use, because it is involved in the double character 
of the facts themselves. There is in it no confusion of 
thought, and need not be of presentation, if the attention 
is distinctly drawn to it. Intellectual activity lies between 
purely causal and purely spiritual forms of being, and is 
affiliated with both. As provided for by fixed physical 
conditions, it is natural ; as active within itself under 
impulses of its own order, it is supernatural. ^ The unity 
of the natural and the supernatural, the rationality of 
both forms of being, is achieved by the intervention of 
this common term. 

When one is occupied with pure thought, he abides in 
a spiritual region ; when he contemplates the conditions of 
action under thought, or its concomitants, he enters the 
realm of causation. 

We have three things to consider: physical, causal facts ; 
intellectual, empirical facts ; purely spiritual, supersen- 
suous phenomena — such as we attribute to God. The 
second term lies between the other two, — the natural and 
the supernatural — and will be united now to the one and 
now to the other according to the manner in which we 
contemplate it. Intellectual activity as associated with 
definite physical conditions is natural, a part of the 
system of nature ; as within itself a law to itself, and so 



86 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 



acting from above on nature, it is supernatural. Two 
conical hills may lie so near each other that the base of 
the one deeply intersects the base of the other. Neither 
can be completely constructed without including material 
which belongs to the other. If we cut down arbitrarily 
between them we mutilate both. It is by this constant 
over-lap that the continuity of the world is preserved. In 
man two kingdoms meet, and from this central position 
we must be able to pass out either way. 

.The totally distinct things, on the relation of which all 
interpretation depends, are physical facts, whose character 
is determinate and fixed ; and pure spiritual processes, 
ready, by a predetermination that arises within them- 
selves, to pass into external expression. Man, as a truly 
intellectual and free being, deals with both these elements. 
Freedom implies both, implies the outward limitation 
which conditions activity, and the inner intellectual life 
which determines it. We may, for purposes of expression, 
annex this realm of freedom, so deeply immersed in 
physical relations, to nature ; or we may, for purposes of 
exposition, unite it to those ever-abiding supernatural 
energies from which it derives its pre-eminent charac- 
teristics. 

The natural and the supernatural so meet in mind, so 
flow together in the events of a rational universe, as not 
only to leave no conflict between them, but to make them 
everywhere the woof and warp of one web. When we 
reach the deepest thing in causal relations it turns out to 
be an intellectual dependence. 

It would be fortunate if we were able to give a distinct 
designation to each of the three things with which we have 
to deal ; events moving necessarily forward under physi- 
cal dependencies ; the rational acts of men self-directed 



1 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 8/ 

under the conditions which enclose them ; and the abso- 
lute activities of God, which assign to themselves both 
directions and conditions. The w^ord natural covers the 
first ; the word supernatural applies with least confusion 
to the third alone. We are thus left with no reciprocal 
designation of the intermediate, uniting term, the volun- 
tary movements of men ; coining a word, we may call 
these internatural. They start in nature, they terminate 
with nature ; but they themselves are not included parts 
of it. The supernatural is thus left as the exclusive 
designation of that which lies above nature and acts upon 
it constructively. Whether we accept these three terms, 
or shuffle on with a double service assigned to the super- 
natural, we shall not clearly apprehend the subject till these 
distinct forms of activity are perfectly before us. The true 
connection of the natural and the supernatural is found in 
the internatural. This alone unites them in a system. 

One mystery makes all these plain, and familiar facts 
obscure to some minds, the mystery of contact between 
the spiritual and the physical. But this mystery — if it be 
wise to call it one — is the exact mystery of the ultimate, 
wherever and whenever we reach it, the myster^^ of gravi- 
tation, of cohesion, of chemical affinity. It is always by 
accepting one mystery that we make many mysteries 
plain. Reason, insight, lie just here in accepting ulti- 
mates wisely ; and one ultimate in itself is as plain as 
another. When an act becomes single, it thereby be- 
comes simple. It admits of no analysis and no explana- 
tion. When things so distinct as spiritual phenomena 
and physical phenomena affect each other, an intermedi- 
ate, as a term of exposition, becomes absurd. It doubles 
the mystery. It renews the error so long persisted in of 
expounding vision by an emanation from the thing visible. 



88 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

The relation of man, as a finite being, to nature, is 
necessarily distinct from that of God as an infinite being. 
The natural is foreign to man, something which proceeds 
without him, and is approached by him only in narrow 
and carefully ordered ways. This path of approach is his 
own physical organization. Each living thing has its own 
terms of mastery, less broad or more broad, over physical 
forms. All lives, taken collectively, penetrate the physi- 
cal elements in innumerable ways for innumerable uses, 
and stand up, in and by each other, in a wide command 
of the world. All this service, by virtue of his superior 
and more complex endowments, culminates in man. 
That slow, organic development, therefore, by which, as 
the latest and highest form of life, he gathers up the 
reins of power which have been placed in his hands, and 
guides the world for his own spiritual purposes, is doubly 
the condition of his control. His manifold physical en- 
dowments are the immediate terms in this government ; 
and like endowments, as varied and multiplied in all lives, 
at a second remove, minister to his purposes, and rest his 
power deeply and broadly on the soil of the earth. 

This evolution, also, carries with it the ability to com- 
prehend the world, and opens backward to him the years 
of God. The intellectual stratum, on which his activity 
rests, is as deep as the physical stratum, and at one with 
it. The natural is that world of substantial, completed 
thought with which his finite powers, in their unfolding, 
are united, and into which they go forth. Here they find 
both the conditions and limits of activity. The natural 
and the supernatural are in equipoise in man, are alike 
the terms of his life. The natural is the conduit of his 
supernatural power which bounds it, guides it, and gives 
way before it. The world is serviceable in the degree in 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 89 

which it is intelligible. It is intelligible, when considered 
as holding these two constituents, in a far more profound 
and comprehensive fashion than when looked on in any 
other manner. This is the way in which men, by the 
growth of knowledge, have come more and more to 
understand the dependencies of matter and mind. These 
two terms, the natural and the supernatural, are the 
banks between which their thoughts have always flowed, 
and are still flowing. Efforts to lift them out of these 
familiar channels must be unsuccessful, because they are 
opposed to the gravitation of mind. We might as well 
expect to turn all the waters of the world into aerial ways. 
As mind has thus far asserted itself, so it will continue to 
assert itself. It cannot accept, and it never will accept, 
conclusions at war with its own processes and its own 
powers. Knowledge with man means a certain mastery of 
mind over matter, and this it will continue to mean. His 
power to modify the world for future uses turns on this 
relation. Things are changeable and lives are variable in 
his hand, and so he multiplies the ministrations of the 
world to himself. The sense of this control not only can 
not depart from man, it is constantly on the increase. 
The growth of knowledge, instead of limiting the super- 
natural, is continually adding to its scope as rightly 
understood. We are perpetually passing from physical 
laws to personal powers, from personal powers to physical 
laws, in the rhythm of intellectual and spiritual progress. 
The natural alone is a flinty rock on which nothing can 
be grown, out of which nothing can be cut ; the super- 
natural alone is shifting clouds which dissolve and redis- 
solve in meaningless forms. The natural, flexible under 
the supernatural, is the marble chiselled into the statue, is 
the opening flower built together by the fugitive light 



go THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

and brooding moisture. The natural and the supernatural 
are different sides of the same thing, the earthward and 
the heavenward side, the outer and the inner side. When 
we walk in the light of our intuitions and affections, we are 
most touched by a sense of the Divine Presence; when we 
take counsel and put our hands to work shrewdly on 
the things about us, we are most impressed by law, by 
stubborn conditions, by the slowly yielding material into 
which human and divine thoughts transform themselves. 
God and man, if they are to meet in activity at all, and 
the overshadowing attributes of the one feed, without 
engulfing, the feeble faculties of the other, must find 
a middle term which shall be the hiding of the Divine 
Presence, on the one side, and the drawing out of human 
powers, on the other side. Nature is such a middle term. 
God here meets us, makes terms with us, gives us our 
lessons, and assigns us our tasks. So disciplined there are 
two suppositions we can make, equally false, equally pro- 
ductive of indolence and irresponsibility. We may mag- 
nify the natural, and say that this apparent potency of 
ours is all deceptive. That, in some subtile way, nature 
overrules us, and runs around us, and drives us about in a 
meaningless manner. Or we may magnify the super- 
natural, and regard the present terms of life as arbitrary, 
to be shaken off, as they have been imposed, by the divine 
will. We may thus wait for new developments, as if the 
law of change were simply one of fortuitous connections. 
The one is the error of an undue extension of causal rela- 
tions, the other the error of magnifying voluntary depen- 
dencies. They are equally opposed to that coherent 
movement of reason by which thought, with no loss of its 
own fluency, is forever passing into the framework of 
things. 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 9I 

The natural, then, is that completed product of spiritual 
activity which expresses itself in things, events, actions, 
under law ; and the supernatural is that spiritual potenti- 
ality, present both in man and God, which is the source oi 
nature. The one is form and the other is spirit. 

The relation of man to nature, as enclosed in it and 
limited by it, readily leads him to misconceive God's rela- 
tion to it. An exterior existence and control, akin to 
that of man, are assigned to God also. Some even ask 
for the brain of God, the point at which his lines of power 
converge. Such a connection of mind with matter is 
necessarily a finite one. The w^orld, the instrument of 
mind, lies exterior to mind, to be subjected to such pro- 
cesses of life as are possible to mind, by means of its own 
physical organism. 

The Infinite must act centre-wise, in a way not illus- 
trated by man's control of nature. The thought of the 
world is inseparable from the energies of the world, in 
their forms, measures, and relations. The mind of God, 
if present at all, is present in them in their very incep- 
tion, in their every manifestation. An incomplete symbol 
of this relation is found in the connection of the spirit 
and body of man. The control which the mind has over 
its own bodily organs is much more perfect and inde- 
pendent than that which it has over other things. Will, 
simple spiritual activity, carries with it ready responses 
within the circuit of the body, and realizes itself at once 
in physical results which cost the spirit nothing. A mind 
that thus sustained -and increased at pleasure all physical 
forces in the entire compass of being would be infinite. 
The regularity of its action would give the laws of nature, 
and the natural would be the habitual expression of the 
supernatural. The two would be the form and force of 



92 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

the same thing. They might easily fall apart in our con- 
sideration of them, as the text of an author and the spirit 
of an author separate themselves in criticism, but the 
fundamental coherence of the two would still remain the 
all inclusive and ultimate fact. 

Suppose this' to be the relation of the physical world 
to God, that it is simply the Divine Mind presenting 
itself in a legible form, would the laws of nature, the 
causal connections of events, find place in it ? We answer 
the question as we answer all like questions, on the basis 
of reason. We answer it, keeping step with the naturalist, 
when he says these laws are universal. Why ? because 
any other supposition does not tally with the claims of 
reason. Is then a causal dependence of physical phe- 
nomena a rational one, if these phenomena rest back on 
mind ? Evidently it is a rational one, as it addresses 
itself to the mind and government of man as no other 
connection could do. If facts are to be intelligible and 
manageable, they must have these dependencies which 
make them so. 

Does this fact compel us to regard these connections as 
absolute ? Not in the least. We admitted them as the 
expression of reason and in its service, and we cannot 
allow them to shake off that service. A method that be- 
comes absolute thereby becomes arbitrary. A rule that 
can never be set aside brings its own distinct evils. 
Reason, the highest reason, does not allow itself to be 
held in subjection by its own processes, does not suffer 
the conditions of one form of structure to rule those of 
another. Reason is infinitely flexible and productive 
within itself. Reason, therefore, prepares us to expect 
more than one method, one manifestation of the super- 
natural, that each manifestation shall be subject to its 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 93 

own purposes, and that all shall be harmonized in the most 
varied uses of mind. It is fit that the supernatural which 
expresses itself in causal relations in the physical world 
should, in subserving other ends, transcend these relations. 

The form most conspicuous and undeniable in which 
the supernatural manifests itself is the miracle. Much 
is unwisely said about the miracle as a violation of natural 
law. The word is intended to carry a sense of injury 
done to the constructive processes of the world. In the 
same spirit a martinet gives rightfulness to a rule aside 
from the purposes it is subserving. If the coherence of 
physical laws is the expression of reason, this elasticity 
under spiritual pressure may be equally so. The additions 
and subtractions of a miracle are not in conflict with the 
ends of law, they simply enlarge them. Nor are these 
additions and subtractions new in kind. They are the 
same in kind. If the sick are healed, they are healed by 
a reinforcement of natural forces. The Infinite is in no 
way bound beyond his own purposes to a given, quantita- 
tive expression. More or less rests on precisely the same 
power that rules at the familiar, medium mark. This 
alleged conflict, either of purpose or of method, disap- 
pears under any comprehensive reference of the world to 
reason. If the world contains no inherent reason, then 
reason can say nothing about it beyond vision ; but if it 
contains reason, then reason, in its full variety of method, 
must be conceded. 

If we are to entertain the supernatural successfully, we 
must do it broadly, freely, as fulfilling a very general, 
harmonious, and concurrent purpose in creation. This it 
does as now offered. The supernatural, underlying every- 
where the natural, declares itself distinctly in the develop- 
ment of life, and still more in rational spirits. The 



94 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

relation of spiritual life to physical things is one permeated 
with a supernatural element. It rises distinctly above 
the plane of causes. Under the guidance of these facts, 
we are able to find The Supernatural, the centre and life 
, of all things, and are prepared for an explicit disclosure of 
this supremacy, on fitting occasion, in the miracle. It is 
the supposed irrationality of the miracle that precludes! 
its acceptance by many ; it is only its plain rationality 
that can make way for it again in the thoughts of all. 

Huxley says that the rationalist no longer objects to 
the miracle as impossible, but as not sufficiently proved. | 
But the proof is rejected chiefly because of the great, 
antecedent improbability which is supposed to attach to 
a miracle. Allow it to be an orderly factor in the spiritual 
world, and the historic proof, as in the narrative of our 
Lord, is quite sufficient to sustain it. If it is a term not ~ 
of order but of confusion, no evidence will long avail. 
The thoughts of men everywhere, in belief and unbelief 
alike, set toward construction. This is the profound, the 
ruling, force in human knowledge. 

In our time- it is not the miracle that establishes the 
divine government, so much as it is the divine govern- 
ment that establishes the miracle. The supernatural is 
by no means that fragmentary, alien thing it is often 
conceived to be. If it were, we could not be too quickly 
rid. of it. On the other hand, rightly understood, it is the 
very substance and soul of spiritual life, a life which is the 
inspiration of all being. The natural is to be swallowed 
up in the supernatural, or rather the two are inseparably 
to pervade each other, as the double terms of one creative 
process. Force and form abide together in all art. 

The life of Christ is a far more com'plete fact, a more 
perfect integer, with the miracles than without them. It 



^ 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 95 

is almost impossible to pluck away, thread by thread, 
these supernatural connections and save any cohesive 
force or beauty in the fabric. The world ^vith the life of 
Christ is a far more rational, afar more invigorating, thing 
than it is Avithout that life. The reason, moving toward 
the higher ends of spiritual comprehension, finds need of 
this supreme fact, and, therefore, for the deepest of all 
reasons, gives it ready admission. Our thought, by means 
of it, makes full the circle of its own relations. 

Let us take, without resting our argument wholly on it, 
the resurrection of our Lord as a favorable example of a 
supernatural event. Notwithstanding the confusion of 
the narratives, notwithstanding the greater difficulty which 
arises from the incongruity of the recorded events, some 
of them resting on a sensuous experience and some of 
them transcending it, some of them amenable to touch 
and vision and some of them not, we still believe it more 
rational to accept the fact of a resurrection than to deny 
it. The proof is sufficient to force the subject before the 
mind and to render any solution of ii; on a natural basis 
unsatisfactory. Many and momentous events seem to 
take their origin from it, and cannot well be explained 
without it. The highest spiritual congruity is attained 
by means of it. However perplexed we may be by the 
conflict of other considerations, this last consideration of 
spiritual congruity restores the equilibrium of the mind in 
firm belief. If we reject the event, on what ground shall 
we do it ? Undoubtedly on the basis of the integrity of 
nature, the rational coherence of physical events. That is 
to say, those convictions of mind which find satisfaction 
in the constructive relations of natural agents predetermine 
us against this event as supernatural. But does not this 
same concession to reason in another direction and a 



96 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

higher one call for the acceptance of the resurrection ? 
If we believe in a spiritual universe, as all our most pene- 
trative insights compel us to, then is not the integrity, the 
inner sufficiency, of these spiritual convictions to have as 
much power with us as like considerations in connection 
with physical events? Certainly we shall not do well 
to allow one conclusion of mind to pull down others of 
equal or greater scope. The right by which the mind 
builds up the realm of natural law is in no way superior 
to that by which it compacts together the spiritual uni- 
verse. One rational process is at the bottom of both of 
them. It is absurd for the mind to attach, by its owr^ 
bent, such weight to physical considerations as to break 
down the cohesive force of its own higher movements. 
If it is entitled to the universality of physical law in 
a physical realm, it is equally entitled to the universality 
of spiritual relations in a spiritual universe. 

We feel, therefore, that the world as a whole is more 
rational, more comprehensible, taken up into a higher 
unity, with than without the resurrection. We thus 
stand, as mind always stands, by faith, faith in its own 
processes, faith in the inner reason of things. That 
to which we direct attention in calling out this faith 
is the more sufficient and comprehensive way in which 
the universe, natural, internatural, and supernatural, is 
bound together by the resurrection. If we lose any one 
of these three terms, we lose a portion of the meaning of 
the other two ; and the resurrection helps us to the mean- 
ing of them all. The meaning of the world is what we 
are seeking for, and if we do not know this meaning when 
we find it, our search must necessarily be futile. 

But this conclusion is not so simple, looked at from all 
positions, as we may now seem to have made it. The 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 97 

mind that is long occupied with physical inquiries derives 
from them a tendency, very valuable and just within its 
own limits, but one that easily leads, first to the over- 
sight, and then to the denial, of the spiritual phenomena 
of the world. The field of one engaged in physical 
research is too remote from these mountain summits, 
and, losing sight of them, he comes to disbelieve in them. 
The things nearest him contradict the alleged freedom of 
thought, and the continuity of the world seems at war 
with it. 

Natural laws, to those who investigate them, assume a 
very absolute and universal form. This universality is 
emphasized at every stage of inquiry, and comes, at 
length, to be accepted as the primary fact in the world, 
and the first principle in philosophy. All knowledge is 
made to rest upon it. Certainly no man is prepared to 
carry on physical inquiries successfully who is not thor- 
oughly possessed of this notion of causation. This is the 
lesson of the last hundred years. But when mind is re- 
garded as subject to the same law, we are extending our 
induction into a new field, and that, too, with no revision of 
our premises, no new weighing of the facts. To assert 
causation here because it prevails elsewhere is to fall 
at once into a priori reasoning. To say that conclu- 
sions, logically coherent within themselves, owe their 
connection to certain prior physical dependencies, is to 
do in a new form, and in an opposite direction, what was 
so often and so unsuccessfully done in physics, when 
physical dependencies were expounded as mental ones, 
and nature was thought, like mind, to prefer and to abhor 
certain states and acts. Indeed, if we are not now in 
error in making acceptance and rejection in man the 
result of accompanying physical facts, the naturalists of a 
7 



98 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

previous time were not so very much astray in thinking 
that a feeling, itself a phase of a physical state, might be 
a link in material connections. 

We most assuredly need to remember that when we 
make the natural, in the form of causal relations, uni- 
versal, we are proceeding simply on a presumption of 
mind, and in no way on direct, perceptive knowledge* 
The question between those who accept, and those who 
deny, the supernatural is one simply of reasonableness in 
method, of the soundness of that sweep of mind by which 
we go beyond the facts before us. The strict naturalist 
must subject all activities, even the activities on which 
the entire explanatory process depends, to physical law. 
Causation thus passes into mental phenomena and sub- 
dues them to itself. This conclusion, which stands at the 
threshold of strict naturalism, is, as already urged, one 
absolutely impossible to sound thought, since it destroys 
the very nature of thought. More than this, causes 
determine the mind to their own universal extension, 
and so the extension itself ceases to be a thing of rea- 
son and remains simply an insoluble fact. But it is not a 
uniform fact, since the majority of men reach no such 
conclusion. There is thus conflict and Qonfusion in the 
facts, and there is no reason left us wherewith to correct 
them, to harmonize them with each other. 

The second step of strict naturalism is somewhat less f 
difficult, though still very difficult. It is the reference of | 
the relations of things, completely intelligible, to some- 
thing less than intelligence. The wisdom of the world — 
great as it is — is a water-mark within its own fibre. It 
enters into the very structure of things, and so shows 
that their putting together was a rational process. This 
naturalism must deny. It cannot admit that construe- 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 99 

tion, like significant speech, rests on a meaning beneath 
it ; that order is the product of wisdom and ruled by it ; 
that nature reposes on the supernatural, which floats 
it as the ocean floats the vessel. 

A third much easier denial of naturalism is that of 
the present modification of physical events by a divine 
agency. It denies the eflRcacy of prayer. Here unbelief 
has to do, not with the general interpretation of facts, 
but with the existence of certain specific facts. It seems, 
therefore, possible, at first sight, to bring the question in 
discussion to a practical test. Are there any answers to 
prayer? Many reply. Yes ; and some reply. No. Can 
these discrepancies of opinion be brought to a rational 
settlement ? Certainly not, if we mean by such a settle- 
ment one independent of our varying methods of interpre- 
tation ; one equally satisfactory to all. The answer to 
prayer appeals to the mind of the supplicant. However 
much beyond the simply physical forces involved the 
answer of prayer may seem to have been, it can still be 
referred to these forces, and will be so referred by every 
one whose attitude of mind is such as to make such a 
reference seem more probable than the notion of divine 
aid. That is to say, in our explanations of the facts of 
the w^orld which touch our dependence on God, we are 
merely giving a specific application of previous convic- 
tions, and we cannot maintain special cases without the 
general principles under which they are marshalled. It 
is every way unreasonable to expect the particular to 
stand up and contradict the general to which it belongs. 

A belief in the answer of prayer arises in connection 
with an interpretation of facts, very wide and varied in 
character, and of very different degrees of force. Ante- 
cedent reasons are present with many minds which make 



lOO THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

the conclusion in a high degree probable. Facts seem to 
them to conform in a remarkable degree to this theory of 
the universe. Extreme naturalism, on the other hand, is 
so prepossessed against the expositions of faith, that it 
ridicules the less obvious examples of the answer of 
prayer, and disbelieves the more obvious ones. Affirma- 
tion and denial, on either side, have no absolute force. 
Proof is not a thing of vision, but turns on the construc- 
tive ideas we have recognized in the framework of things. 
No man can allow secondary, outstanding facts to contra- 
dict fundamental relations. This would be to yield the 
greater to the less, and undo all the work of thought. 

If we were to establish two hospitals, as nearly as pos- 
sible alike in their appliances and methods ; if we were 
to govern the one by the temper of naturalism, and the 
other by that of faith, — a thing impossible to do in this 
predetermined fashion — doubtless the results would be 
somewhat different in the number of cures effected. 
Suppose this difference to lie on the side of faith, it 
would still be quite possible to say, and from the position 
of naturalism rational to say, that faith is itself a potent 
natural factor ; that it gives enthusiasm and hope to those 
who entertain it, and so, as awakened life, becomes a 
restorative agency ; that it imparts peace and resignation 
to those who suffer, and is thus a spiritual anodyne to 
physical irritations that otherwise exhaust the resources 
of life ; in short, that the mind itself is an important fac- 
tor in critical forms of disease, and that in these, its 
remedial relations, it is greatly strengthened by faith. 

On the other hand, it would be equally possible to say 
that these results of faith imply the validity of faith, and 
rest upon it ; that we cannot maintain enthusiasm, hope, 
peace, for a series of years in a series of minds, with no 



THE SUPERNATURAL. lOI 

sufficient foundation for them ; that this admitted efficacy 
of faith involves a sufficient reason, and that this reason 
is recognized by rehgion and denied by unbehef. These 
responses, backward and forward, would owe their force 
to prior principles, and would settle nothing indepen- 
dently of them. 

The notion of a sufficient test of the efficacy of prayer 
is gross and irrational. It is gross because it implies that 
some visible and undeniable fact can be evidence of an 
invisible relation. We might with equal fitness demand 
of those who accept life as a plastic power, that it should 
be made tangible to us. It is irrational, because sound 
thought requires that we should give any alleged phe- 
nomena the precise conditions under which they are said 
to occur. We cannot do this in prayer in the form of an 
experiment. The mind cannot thus be left alone with 
God. We are virtually trying to quiz the spirit of man 
and the Spirit of Truth in their dealings with each other. 

In the fourth place mere naturalism must deny — a 
denial easy in itself — the miracle. The test, just referred 
to, of visible results, should be applied to the miracle — if 
applied at all — and not to the answer of prayer. The 
answer of prayer always offers itself under a natural form, 
while the miracle transcends natural law in a bold and 
decisive way. But Hume was quite right in affirming 
that the miracle, on the basis of mere naturalism, cannot 
be established, even by vision. The miracle is one experi- 
ence contradicting a thousand other experiences. There 
must be in the mind that accepts it some prior reason 
which reconciles the result with its previous knowledge, 
or belief in it is irrational. If I accede to one man's 
testimony against a thousand, there must be some other 
reason for this concession than the mere fact that he is 



102 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

one of the thousand. A single circumstance cannot con- 
tradict a hundred others resting on the same basis with it. 
The universaHty of causation, the one undoubted princi- 
ple of knowledge, compels the man who accepts natural- 
ism to believe, in the case before him, that sufficient 
causes are present to secure the anomalous result ; and 
thus that result, whatever it is, ceases to be a miracle. 

If miracles are rational, the historical proof is sufficient 
to make way for them ; but if they are irrational, the his- 
torical proof weakens at once. This evidence is also 
further burdened by the fact that in the great majority of 
cases the alleged miracle is irrational, and so fails. The 
handling of proof turns constantly on intrinsic fitness. 

What miracles, if any, are to be accepted, is a question 
to which we can make answer only when we have searched 
our philosophy through and through for the reasons of 
miracles. Miracles, whatever else they are or are not, are 
a supreme test of our methods of thought, the balance we 
have instituted between spiritual and physical energies. 
The works and words of Christ make an incomparable 
whole, a seamless garment. For this reason we believe in 
them with unwavering faith, but we can justify that faith 
only as the summation of all thought, as our deepest in- 
sight into the coherence of things. 

Christ, it is said, did not many mighty works there 
because of their unbelief. As theologians often look at 
the miracle, this reason would seem to be unsound. The 
purpose of the miracle is thought to be the silencing of 
unbelief. So Elijah used it against the priests of Baal. 
The method of Christ implies that it is primarily a revela- 
tion of God to minds prepared to receive it. The miracle 
is not an assault on the gates of unbelief, an effort to carry 
the world by storm. This is profoundly impossible. It 



THE SUPERNATURAL. IO3 

IS a transfiguration, a melting of the visible before the eye 
of faith into the invisible, an overleaping of the limits of 
the visible with the glories of the invisible, a suffusion of 
lines in a marvellous play of light, art transcending itself. 

If we are at all right in what we have said, the usual 
order of denial and affirmation must necessarily be barren 
of results. The root of the supernatural is not the 
miracle. This is at best the perfume of its topmost 
flower. That by which it roots itself in the earth, and 
holds it as its own, is the power of mind, the very nature 
of spirit. Naturalism, in the limited meaning in which 
we are now using the word, having weakened our sense of 
our own distinctive nature, is ready to deny the miracle, 
then to doubt the efficacy of prayer, then to swallow up 
the thought of the world in the inherent relations of 
material forces, and, in confirmation of all, to affirm the 
absolute oneness of law in matter and mind. 

The proper !*ne of defence in faith is the reverse of this. 
We must first understand the nature of spirit, human and 
divine — the law of mind within itself. We shall then see 
its relation to physical things, its flow through them, its 
transcription of itself in them as a visible medium of ex- 
pression and a determinate field of action ; the reserve of 
itself to itself by which, on occasion given by reason, it 
transcends the ordinary restraints of reason, and discloses 
itself by a light that, for an instant and for an instant 
only, darkens all other light. 

If we consent to settle this question of the supernatural 
at the point of miracles, its most remote manifestation, 
with all the illusions against us which crowd in from the 
manifold superstitions of men, and with an overshadowing 
sense of the majesty of law as the full expression of the 
Divine Mind, we shall make concessions that we cannot 



I04 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

atecall, and find ourselves slowly pushed backward, till 
we have come under that great horror, instinctive and 
rational, life that is losing itself. 

It is this faintness of the spirit within itself that, in 
works of fiction well conceived, makes the loss of faith so 
pathetic. The patient, under the slow inroads of unbelief, 
yields one and another disclosure of the supernatural, 
finds the miracle increasingly out of sorts with the his- 
toric world, finally turns to that world as one unbroken 
stretch of causal relations, and, if still earnest, enters on 
the despairing effort of restoring to itself and to others a 
spiritual presence. He inevitably fails in the effort, not 
because it is not a most needful one, but because the 
mind has too long been busy in chipping away every foot- 
hold and plucking up every shrub by which it might, 
like a wrecked mariner, mount the face of the cliff that 
now rises a sheer precipice before it. Such a one cannot 
fall back successfully on the inner testimony of the spirit, 
because, in painfully discrediting each of the manifesta- 
tions of the spiritual history of the world, he has hidden 
much of that history from himself. Pre-eminently is this 
true for the popular mind. The preacher who is trying 
to persuade men to righteousness, conceiving it in its 
most abstract form, finds himself making violent, spas- 
modic efforts to breathe in an atmosphere too high and rare 
for the purposes of life, too high and rare for those whom 
he struggles to lead, by this remote and visionary path, 
into the experiences of faith. Heroism is all that remains 
to him. 

This question of naturalism and supernaturalism can 
be safely settled only by a wide survey of the entire field. 
Assert distinctly the primitive powers of mind, and we are 
borne on by them till the world is everywhere the medium 



THE SUPERNATURAL. I05 

and expression of thought. Deny spiritual intervention 
in physical things, and one support after another of the 
personal element gives way, till the weary spirit, like a 
spent swimmer, sinks beneath the cold, restless surge of 
material forces. We should refuse to close an argument 
of this depth and moment until we have fully measured 
all its implications. 

A whip, skilfully constructed, is completely elastic at 
one extremity and almost wholly inelastic at the other. 
The quality grows in one direction and declines in the 
opposite, and this it is which makes of it a perfect and 
graceful instrument. Inelastic throughout, and it is a 
cudgel, with which to bruise and to maim. The world is 
an admirable construction for the uses of mind, because 
inflexible physical and flexible spiritual forces interpene- 
trate each other everywhere in it. Try to understand it 
otherwise, make it rigid with natural law, and it becomes 
a club with which to beat the spirit and destroy its life. 

The first purpose subserved by the supernatural is that 
of enabling us fully to understand the personifying ten- 
dency in man. We encounter this effort to penetrate to 
a personal core of things equally in sound thought and 
in earnest feeling. The world constantly reflects us to 
ourselves, and we are no longer alone in it. Face makes 
answer to face, as in a glass, and the mind of man awakens 
in a world of mind. There is no tendency in man more 
universal and irresistible than this tendency to seek for 
and find the personal in the world about him. It arises 
in furtherance of poetic and religious sentiments alike. It 
discloses the spiritual framework of things, and at the 
same time seeks to adorn it with all the sprightliness of 
art. It makes the world deeply significant in the only 
way irr which it can at once and equally address the 



I06 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

thoughts and the affections. The spiritual and personal are 
not the yeast of waves that have beaten themselves into 
foam, the last, slightest, and most soHtary of products ; 
they are primordial as well as final, fundamental as well as 
superficial, that which we are reaching as the deepest, 
most refreshing truth in all our inquiry. The world is 
open to art because it is animate ; it is religious because 
it abides everywhere under supersensuous law. The en- 
tire search of the truly devout mind is for the personal, the 
spiritual, the divine in the world ; and for the power to 
abide on terms of sympathy with it. Superstition is the 
immaturity and distortion of this growth, and yet the 
religious impulse, in the darkest periods and places, is the 
one redemptive power, lifting men from an animal basis. 
Here is a being who can be touched, profoundly touched, 
by a sense of the invisible ; a being who is open to d,ll 
those motives which come from the spiritual world ; a 
being, therefore, who belongs to that world, and can be 
brought under its perfect law. This search for the per- 
sonal, this delight in it, this free subjection in righteous- 
ness to it, find full satisfaction only in the supernatural 
as centred in the Divine Life. So the natural becomes 
its instant expression. The two elements cease to be 
estranged from each other, and go forth together as the 
sensuous and spiritual side of the same movement, a 
movement always more and greater than its present mani- 
festation. Thus the supernatural loses all waywardness, 
and the natural all deadness ; the two are blended in per- 
fected life. 

It is a matter of surprise that the evolutionist passes so 
lightly the religious tendency in man, a tendency so pecul- 
iar, so universal, so controlling, so aspiring. As a simple 
fact, an actual energy, it deserves far more attention than 



THE SUPERNATURAL. lO/ 

it receives, implies a far deeper relation than is conceded to 
it. Instead of being an impulse that can be pushed aside, 
as a transient, erratic energy, it offers itself as the germ of 'f 
all upward movement, the one spiritual term which men 
hold in common. Sensuous motives bring to men no 
sufificient government. They must be supplemented and 
replaced by supersensuous ones. Trhe first terms in this, 
advanced and advancing experience have been, and for 
most men are, contained in the religious life. Errors and 
failures plead nothing against it. These are a matter of 
course, and merely mark the steps of development. That 
faith w^hich most fully contains this personifying tendency, 
this search of mind for mind, this reproduction of rational 
life in rational life, shows itself to be a stadium in the up- 
ward march, a focus at which all forces are converging. 

-The natural separated from the supernatural is the 
slow strangulation of spiritual life. Poetry is a fiction of 
the feelings, and religion a feebleness of the thoughts ; 
while the world, in all its glorious changes, has no more 
life or assured promise in it than a top spinning on its 
axis. Such a conception is too dead to be long enter- 
tained even by naturalism, and so there begin to steal in 
those illogical abatements and insufficient corrections of 
w^hich this philosophy is so full, and is becoming increas- 
ingly full. Life is thought to have a tendency to varia- 
tion, which can be manipulated by natural selection into 
something very like progress; and an 'Unknown is ad- 
vanced as the ultimate term of thought — an Unknown 
that can be nursed into a- divinity not wholly remote from 
God. And so the impoverished roots of thought are fed 
once more by fancy. 

It is certainly strange that the ripe reason of the posi- 
tivist should be employed, 'in its most extreme and erratic 



I08 THE NEW THEOLOGY, 






freedom, to set aside the inherent, inevitable movement 
of reason in the race ; and yet the gist of reason remain 
with the positivist a causal, and not a voluntary, relation. 
On their own basis, it is absurd for a handful of positiv- 
ists to flatly contradict the general methods of human 
thought. 

But why should we be content to accept their feeble 
concessions, to glean these few heads of wheat — often ■ 
only tares — in a field all our own? If law is that absolute | 
thing with which we start our parable, then all makeshifts j 
in satisfaction of human feeling will turn out illusions. \ 
Fate is a mild word for this deadlock of eternity, and J 
human history, with its fears and hopes, and endless shifti- | 
ness to the eye, a bitter mockery, when contrasted with | 
its inner, inevitable drift toward the unknown. If this f 
causal law is allowed to break for an instant at a single 
point, we cannot knit it a second time ; we can only 
regain coherence by passing fully over to that higher * 
unity in spiritual life by which distinct methods are 
resolved into one movement under the mastery of pure 
reason. 

The second purpose which the supernatural subserves, 
is that of rest to our higher faculties ; and each purpose, 
let us remember, is an argument in behalf of the super- , 
natural. The only right of being, is a reason for being, i 
This truth is enforced by science. Our empiricism, even, ! 
has taught it us all along. We saw many things which 
we did not understand, that seemed purposeless, or worse 
than purposeless, in the world. They had the right of 
being, with no reason for being. This impression, inquiry 
has steadily dispelled ; and we have come to see — not 
yet completely, but very fully — that a right and a reason 
have gone together, and things have been chiefly by virtue 



THE SUPERNATURAL. lOg 

of the purposes they have subserved. The efficient 
causes and the final causes have been blended in them as 
in natural selection. The fittest survive, and they survive 
because they are the fittest. That which subserves a 
purpose, that which stands in constructive harmony with 
other things, for that reason abides in strength. We may 
figure this relation as an equilibrium of forces, or as an 
inner coherence of the divine thought. In either way, the 
right and the reason, the fact and its purpose, go together. 

With this second purpose of rest comes the third pur- 
pose, which can best be treated with it, of enlargement. 
We cannot have spiritual rest without spiritual enlarge- 
ment. Rest is the repose of 'powers in spiritual activities 
that sufficiently employ them and reward them. The 
intellectual constitution makes a demand, quite the 
equivalent of that of the body, for sufficient air , it refuses 
to be suffocated ; repression is most irksome to it. Range 
and vitality go together. But there is no enlargement for 
reason like that which makes reason the universal element 
in all things. Between this conception and that of 
universal causal relations there is no comparison in the 
stimulus offered by them. The one contains the other 
and much more. Order is admitted by reason up to the 
line at which it becomes rigid, cold, and dead ; at which 
it ceases to be artistic and spiritual. The supernatural, 
rightly understood, is an inexhaustible wealth that lies 
beyond the natural, a light that percolates through the 
cloud and glorifies it, without dispersing it ; that discloses 
its outlines in changeable interplay with the very element 
that- is streaming through it. 

There are peculiarly gifted and noble natures, minds 
whose intellectuality is of a remarkable order, that find 
satisfaction in naturalism alone — men like Darwin, whose 



no THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

activity in one direction is so great, so fascinating, so 
successful, that it swallows up all impulses and fills the 
entire circle of the powers. But these persons are 
altogether exceptional ; exceptional as men of ability, 
and exceptional among men of ability. They are not 
more numerous than are Stoics in society. The stoical 
attitude is genuine and one of much nobility. It owes 
this nobility to an exaggeration of the very principle we 
are enforcing — the power of mind. The Stoic, in assert- 
ing this power, finds an exhilaration which he can, in 
some measure, mistake for satisfaction. But the rest of 
Stoicism, in a stern defiance of fortune, is very different 
from that insight which sees fortune forever resolving 
itself along lines of light into divine favor. The devotee 
of naturalism, in the enthusiasm of a study of nature, so 
magnifies intellect, on its practical side, that he overlooks 
the indignity and weakness he has put upon it theoreti- 
cally. This quiet of naturalism, pursuing for a brief 
period the paths of inquiry, is much inferior to that loving 
faith which makes the spirit forever a denizen of a universe 
of ideas and ideal affections. 

This rest and this enlargement in reason mean every- 
thing for the most spiritual minds, and mean very much 
for the average mind. The impersonal is altogether too 
cold and abstract for household warmth, for daily affec- 
tions. The masses of men, if they are to be impelled 
forward, must find their impulse in things that lie near 
them, in a love that begets love, in a righteousness that 
carries its rewards and retributions with it, and, standing 
at the very portal of the heart, administers them as 
immediate affections and passions. 

It is not the progress of a few, nor the convictions of a 
few, that are to measure human development, nor to fur- 



THE SUPERNATURAL. Ill 

nish within themselves the conditions of growth for any 
considerable number in any given period. The leaders of 
Israel will linger in the wilderness as long as Israel is 
there. The real question we have always to propound is 
not, what motives suffice in single minds for brief mo- 
ments, but what motives are sufficient for all men in the 
entire stage of growth. Facts answer this question much 
more exactly than theories. Evidently nothing can be so 
universally efficient as the expansion of the affections 
common to us all toward God, and their return thence to 
a more quiet and pervasive action among ourselves. 
The love of man is a corollary of the love of God, an item 
under it ; and the love of God keeps pace with our love of 
men, is an aggregate of it. To expand the affections 
outward and upward, is to make them restful on their own 
centre of human love, is to justify universal harmony to 
the thoughts and to develop it in the feelings at one and 
the same time, by one and the same process. Rebel 
against it as we please, the mind can attain to no perfect 
ideal which is not then and there colored and made vital 
by the feelings ; and the feelings of men are not detached 
and personal possessions, but part and portion of universal 
humanity. The daylight that cheers my room receives its 
quantity and quality from universal light. The universe 
is made a universe to man*s spiritual nature, and filled 
from bound to bound with its own light by virtue of the 
love of God, by virtue of the spiritual presence which 
pervades it. Christ, in revealing this love, in a very direct 
sense in reflecting it, became the light of the world. He 
who walks without love, walks in darkness ; and love in its 
supreme form can only belong to a Supernatural Personal 
Presence. All love must be secondary, derived and 
trifling compared with this love. 



112 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

The reasons which lead us to enforce the supernatural 
are at one with those which urge us to insist on the natural. 
The supernatural nourishes that sense of power to which 
the natural gives adequate expression. The two are the 
equilibrium of strength. Lacking sufficient faith in the 
natural, we miss the means of wise and successful work. 
Lacking faith in the supernatural, we fail of the full 
inspiration and reward of that work. In short periods and 
with single persons faults of methods will be obscure and 
partial ; for we are living in an atmosphere prepared for 
us, not in one created by us. Our work, if it has the least 
depth, must pass on to the next generation for its dis- 
closure. In our efforts to escape the partial forms of faith, 
we easily slip beyond the lines of growth. We do well to 
remember that every position in progress, well taken, 
springs directly from previous ones. The supernatural 
has wrought in the world's history as a supreme force. 
The next phase of thought is not its exclusion, but its 
coalescence with the natural. Those rare manifestations 
of the supernatural which have given so much offence to 
the critical temper will then be lost in the pervasive 
presence of Creative Power. The vitality of the world will 
not be established by brilliant exceptions, but by habitual 
on-goings. That the supernatural in the past has by a 
little overlapped the natural in striking manifestations is 
quite in keeping with that universal push of life, not yet 
dominant, by which, within the limits of nature, it has 
enlarged nature itself. Our very evolution becomes blind 
and aimless if we undertake to dispense with the super- 
natural. 



CHAPTER III. 

DOGMATISM. 

Dogma has played a very extended, and, at times, a 
very unfortunate, part in Church history. Reformed 
churches not less than those waiting reform, Protestants 
even more than Catholics, have attached an importance 
to doctrines quite beyond the part they are fitted to play 
in a healthy spiritual life. 

Dogma grows up, in the first instance, in satisfaction of 
the mind. It is the result of an intellectual impulse, and 
performs, therefore, a service both legitimate and valuable. 
It is a movement in every way, at its inception, in keeping 
with the progress of truth. Proportion and balance men 
always find most difficult to achieve. Not only does each 
effort tend to excess in itself, later, it is the occasion of a 
kindred excess in an opposite direction. Hence men are 
now speaking contemptuously of the speculative tendency 
of thought, as contrasted with inquiry. As a matter of 
fact, each is equally essential, and the two supplement 
each other. Inquiry will reach no goal without the theo- 
retical tendency, and this tendency will exhaust itself in 
abstractions unless given fresh, fruitful data by inquiry. 

The process of deductive thought, which finds expres- 
sion in dogma, is valid and primary. In mathematics, the 
results of pure thought are of extended, and of complete, 
utility. Reasoning, in this direction, is so safe and produc- 

8 113 



114 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

tive because of the entire simplicity and adequacy of the 
notions with which it sets out. Speculation so often mis- 
carries in the wider world of facts and events because its 
primary conceptions are inadequate or untrue. In these 
directions empirical inquiry must enter the more con- 
stantly to enlarge and correct its premises. Hence knowl- 
edge, in the physical and moral world, where the data are 
complex, obscure and changeable, must be won equally 
by insight and observation, by exposition and an ever 
renewed search into the facts to be expounded. 

Theology has grown almost exclusively by a deductive 
process. A few root ideas have given form to its conclu- 
sions. It has thus, while in itself a most legitimate and 
desirable attainment, fallen into a double error. It has 
allowed deduction to push aside induction, while dealing 
not with simple, abstract ideas, but with most complex 
and obscure facts ; and, from a practical point of view, a 
still more fatal mistake, it has allowed the speculative 
interest of thought to take, in part, the place of interest || 
in virtue, in a life thoroughly harmonized within and 
without with existing conditions of conduct. Thus there , , 
has been not only an unwarrantable separation of the ^ 
two terms in the double processes of acquiring knowl- 
edge; there has been a kindred partition of the triple 
process of conduct. 

Thinking has been partially separated from its imme- f 
diate union with feeling and action, and that in a direction j 
in which all three are most closely affiliated. Speculation 
has thus ceased to be sound thinking and productive think- 
ing. It has failed from one and the same cause on the 
theoretical and on the practical side. Its root ideas have 
not found correction and enlargement in the facts which 
came under them, and the fresh fruits of conduct and 



DOGMATISM. II5 

* 
character have been much dwarfed and diminished in 
amount. The speculative rehgious Hfe has tended to 
lose connection with actual life, both in its comprehension 
and in its government. 

It IS not strange, under these circumstances, that the 
pursuit of dogma should have shown a temerity on the one 
side, and an audacity on the other, equally foreign to its 
proper intellectual and spiritual temper. Robustness and 
good-will w^ere both lost. Perhaps no theological discus- 
sion ever exhibited this tendency in a more repulsive form 
than that which attended in the fourth century — a lead- 
ing century in religious dogma — on the development of 
the doctrine of the Trinity. Slight, well-nigh unintelli- 
gible, and more or less fantastic, distinctions w^ere urged 
with a vehemence and virulence that broke asunder all 
the ordinary ties of good-will. The vineyard of God was 
furiously trampled under foot by the blind rage of those 
to whom it had been committed. 

We would not, for an instant or in any degree, lose 
sight of the wholly legitimate and very desirable character 
of a systematic pursuit of Christian doctrine. Both the 
terms of thought and the terms of action will be much 
modified by it. It is the result of our general desire of 
knowledge and safe guidance directed to the very highest 
field of investigation. We wish, however, to insist that 
Christian doctrine, as it has to do not with simple, pri- 
mary conceptions, but with most complex and abstruse 
ideas, and with an extended survey of the facts included 
under them, must prosper, as a department of knowledge, 
not by deduction alone, but by deduction constantly 
sustained by induction. The speculative methods of 
theology are neither practically safe nor theoretically justi- 
fied when we consider the real service that falls to it. 



Il6 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

Its field of thought is the moral world — that is, the entire 
world, looked at in its spiritual relations. No matter 
whether the growth of knowledge, by which we come 
increasingly to understand the world as the arena of 
spiritual life, comes to us by Revelation or by rational 
inquiry, as knowledge, it must, in the end, distinctly and 
correctly cover these facts, the moral character of God, 
the moral discipline of the world, the moral development 
of man individually and in society. Hence there is no 
department of thought which addresses itself more directly 
and comprehensively to facts, near and remote, plain and 
obscure, than this very inquiry of theology. And hence, 
again, there is no form of inquiry which should bind 
together more carefully and cautiously the two processes 
of mind which we express as deduction and induction. 

However we may conceive the character of God, that 
conception, whether gathered from the Word of God or 
from various thoughts concerning him, must conform to 
that presentation of his being which finds expression in 
his works. This is the truly authoritative declaration, 
because it is the actual one, and also the very one which 
Revelation and human thought are present to expound. 
Our inquiries, therefore, into the nature of God, while 
resting on the conceptions of good men concerning him, 
must be accompanied by a constant effort to make our 
thought of him harmonious and adequate within itself, 
and by a desire assiduously to correct and enlarge all 
impressions by putting them into more complete . con- 
formity with what the world offers us in a positive and 
concrete form on the same theme. 

The divine nature and the divine character, which con- 
stitute fundamental conceptions in theology, are facts 
which are delineated in another way in the nature and 



DOGMATISM. II7 

progress of the world about us. Revelation can only make 
this their immediate relation more clear and explicit. While 
Revelation interprets the world, the world equally, in turn, 
interprets Revelation. The light of religious truth is only- 
satisfactory when it brings disclosure to things, and finds 
full reflection in them. Light is revelation because all 
objects rejoice in it, and instantly take on, by means of 
it, their own proper form and beauty. That which waits 
to be illuminated and habilitated by the Revelation of 
God are the works of God. 

The government of God flows directly from his charac- 
ter ; and certainly we cannot study that government, nor 
accept any presentation of it except in connection with 
an inquiry into a history of the world and human history, 
the only products of that government known to us. The 
obscurity which rests on individual, national, and race de- 
velopment, on the forces which initiate and sustain growth 
in society and the ends reached by it, is that which drives 
us to inquiry. This obscurity can only give way before a 
presentation of the divine method which carries light and 
guidance into all the affairs of men. We understand the 
divine mind in and by these affairs. 

The nature of man, the nature of sin, the lines and 
methods of redemption, the spiritual history of the human 
race, are all themes which teach facts, far and near, and 
can only be discussed successfully by theology in connec- 
tion with these facts. However absolute w^e may suppose 
Revelation to be, it is not thereby relieved of the neces- 
sity of conforming to the facts of which it is treating. 
We are entitled to an anthropology, a psychology, a soci- 
ology, a philosophy of development, and all these forms 
of knowledge must give us data and principles covering at 
least a portion of the field of theology. The true sources 



Il8 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

of truth must conform to each other in their results, or 
our knowledge falls into hopeless confusion. What we 
find the nature of man, that Revelation must declare it to 
be ; and what Revelation declares it, that we must find it 
to be. The two sets of conceptions teach the same facts, 
and must be brought into harmony by them. Nothing 
can put down the facts, be it theory or Revelation. 

The moral forces w^hich rule the world are the forces 
which religious truth and social science are both dealing 
with. The two — social science and theology — have pre- 
cisely the same problem, expressed on this side as the per- 
fection of society, and on that side as the Kingdom of 
Heaven. Not only must there be a mutual understand- 
ing between these two forms of effort, there must be an 
extended, yes, a complete interlock of labor ; and a theol- 
ogy which seeks the regeneration of society in ignorance 
of social laws is doomed to failure, and a sociology which 
does not place prominent among the spiritual powers, the 
power of faith, is striving to guide men and lead them 
into excellence without imparting the true life-giving 
impulse. 

The great danger of theology has been, and still is, that 
it desires to become the finished product of a narrowly 
deductive process, that it ascribes to its immediate con- 
clusions a divine authority, and thus, in the temper of 
dogmatism, anticipates all the instruction of scientific in- 
quiry, human history, and God's daily providence ; and 
struggles hard to put upon the growing products of 
thought, as fast as they arise, a narrow construction of its 
own. The deductive tendency naturally runs in advance 
of the inductive, and often submits with an ill grace to its 
ally when it arrives. Yet, if the divine mind and method 
are to be pre-eminently associated with cither of these two 



DOGMATISM. II9 

forms of thought, they are to be united to the inductive, 
rather than to the deductive, process, to the child-Hke 
temper rather than to the philosophic temper, to the grand 
procession of events in which the thoughts of God are un- 
folding themselves rather than to our curious speculations 
concerning them, or expansion of the earlier forms of our 
thought about them. The Messiah never meets the ex- 
pectations of those who are waiting for him. It is the 
mind that must ever submit itself to the divine ordination 
of events. 

A kindred difficulty has shown itself even in science. 
Those who, in youth, have made great additions to 
knowledge, and brought to it the light of new principles, 
are frequently, in old age, disposed to restrain the very 
methods of inquiry by which they have prospered, simply 
because these methods are tending to bring further and 
unacceptable modifications of opinion. But this slight 
inflexibility in scientific thought, troublesome as it some- 
times is, is nothing to the inflexibility of theological 
conclusions, wedded to their lines of deductive reasoning, 
and filled with a sense of divine revelation. The proper 
relation of religious truth to practical experience is, in 
itself, so important, and a recognition of it is so necessary 
to any right understanding of theology, that we shall be 
pardoned if we present it somewhat fully. 

Let us take such a system of religious faith as that 
offered by Dr. Charles Hodge, in his " Systematic The- 
ology." This voluminous treatise may well enough stand 
for other systems, because it is a recent one, and one not 
very extreme in its conclusions nor unusual in its methods. 
He starts with the assertion that the Scriptures contain 
all the facts of theology. '' Theology is the exhibition of 
the facts of Scripture, in their proper order and relation, 



I20 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

with the principle or general truths involved in the facts 
themselves/' The theology which follows, however, is 
almost exclusively a discussion of the principles thought 
to be contained in the facts and teachings of Scripture, 
and far more in its teachings than in its facts. . Its facts, 
as facts simply, are placed at their lowest value. The 
force and pith of them are found in the words which 
accompany them. Inspiration is held to give exact truth, 
and this belief lifts the burden of inquiry from the circum- 
stances which accompany the words of the sacred writer, 
and directs it to the words themselves. Indeed, under 
this view of the nature of Revelation, facts lose most of 
their significance. They are only the framework of the 
picture. They may enhance its impression, but do not 
determine its nature. They are occasions, but not con- 
trolling causes. The truth has its inner perfection aside 
from those to whom, and by whom, it was spoken. If 
facts are to be treated as facts, they must be allowed their 
full efficiency, and a careful, historic inquiry must unfold 
the growth of truth under them and by them. If the de- 
velopment of the truth is relatively independent of them, 
by being of a divine order, most of the value of the facts 
as interpreting terms is taken from them. Mathematical 
truth is not dependent for its force on occasions ; in an 
important sense it has no occasions, as it is absolute within 
itself and unaffected by any particular application. This 
system, like most systems, is not exegetical in a historic 
way, but regards the declarations of Scripture, at all 
periods by all persons, as final, and simply sets itself the 
task of a systematic statement of the truths they are sup- 
posed to contain. Supernatural facts, indeed, receive 
some attention ; but merely natural facts trail on in the 
shadow of the ruling, divine manifestation that is always 



DOGMATISM. 121 

rising above them. Hardly any inquiry, therefore, is 
more thoroughly deductive, under the lead of a few initi- 
ative ideas, than the investigation which issues in this 
" Systematic Theology." While no objection is taken to 
the method simply because it is deductive, the fact calls 
for the utmost caution in attaining the data from which 
the deduction is to proceed, and in establishing the tests 
and the independent sources of correction by which it is 
to be sustained and restrained at every stage of progress. 

The principles w^hich make up systematic theology are 
not pure, mental conceptions. They are ideas which owe 
their entire value to their perfect correspondence with 
obscure and complex facts. They involve the relations 
which lie between these facts in their final interpretation. 
The definition we may frame of God must find its correct- 
ness not merely in its logical coherence, but in its power 
to express to us the origin and growth of the universe. 
Our doctrine of the atonement must correspond with the 
moral incentives we experience day by day, and disclose 
their vital power. 

This system of theology, in common with many an- 
other, makes little provision for correct data, or for 
testing the conclusions that are arising under them. 
These data include two terms — the accepted powers of 
mind and the specific affirmations of the text. The 
powers of mind may be inferred from the text, or the 
text, in its meaning, may be shaped to meet an ante- 
cedent conception of the powers of mind. That is to say, 
we may derive our philosophy from our theology, or we 
may reach our theology through our philosophy. The 
reverent mind, which insists on the absolute character of 
Revelation, naturally inclines to the first method. The 
second set of data, the inspired teachings, are regarded 



122 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

as complete in themselves, and carry with them, by easy 
inference, the prior data. All things, therefore, are now 
ready, and every truth can be wrung from the text. No 
assumption could more simplify the process of deduction 
and divest it of all preliminary difficulties. The supposi- 
tion of complete inspiration greatly reduces also the need 
of verification in the progress of the deductive process. 
Deduction, if you have absolute premises, is one of the 
clearest and safest movements of mind. This fact sys- 
tematic theology is sure to remember, and it comes, there- 
fore, with its final results, fully prepared to overbear any 
facts which may stand in their way. Far from correcting 
its interpretation by the facts, it corrects the facts by its 
divinely certain rendering of them. The facts are bidden, 
with no gentle voice, to stand one side. Nothing but the 
plainest contradiction disturbs the dogmatic temper, and 
even this contradiction it denies so long as it is possible 
to do so. Thus such questions as the creation of the 
world, the origin of man, the time of his appearance on 
the earth, his primitive state, the form of his historic de- 
velopment, are first pronounced upon, then discussed 
wholly upon the defensive, and made to suffer in their 
consideration all the distortion of an inflexible theory, a 
theory whose inflexibility is kept constantly at a maxi- 
mum, being that of revealed truth. Thus the worst 
dangers of deduction are made unavoidable and are per- 
petually recurrent. 

If we were to allow the legitimacy of deduction so em- 
ployed, — which we certainly cannot — it still remains true 
that we do not secure the footing by means of it we are 
thought to attain. Take the most fundamental doctrine 
of all, the nature of God. Dr. Hodge regards — and it 
may well be so regarded — the definition of the West- 



DOGMATISM. I23 

minster Catechism as among the most complete — ^* God 
is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, 
wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.'* 
How is a definition of this kind framed ? 

It is shaped under our growing conception of the har- 
mony of attributes in a perfect being. We cannot put it 
together mechanically, bit by bit, its several parts being 
taken from the Bible. We may immensely quicken the 
mind in framing it by a study of the spirit and power of 
the Scriptures, but the definition remains ours, remains 
that of the Westminster Catechism, and not that of the 
Bible. The whole formative process is one of utmost 
delicacy and insight, and must turn, in its fulness and 
correctness, on the intellectual development and spiritual 
penetration of those who are at work on it. Many state- 
ments of Scripture must receive fitting abatement in its 
formation. The anger, jealousy, and repentance of God, 
and his propitiation by us, must take a meaning in har- 
mony with the conception, and must not themselves be 
allowed to color it. That is to say, the process of inclu- 
sion and rejection, of increase and diminution, must 
proceed under the rational activity of the constructive 
mind, directed toward the Scriptures, toward human 
history, and toward all ultimate truths. This fundamen- 
tal statement in all theology, the nature of God, is not a 
pure, unmistakable product of Revelation, but one to be 
attained in connection with it, with varying success, accord- 
ing to the insight and temper brought to the undertaking. 
We owe this particular definition to the Westminster 
Divines. They are the lens of this light, the immediate 
medium between us and God. Their perspicuity is our 
insight. 

Pass this point. Take the definition just as it is ; allow 



124 THE NEW THEOLOC^V. 

it the authority of Scripture, and yet it is no safe datum 
for heroic deduction. It is not a definition — very far from 
it — whose meaning is precise and unmistakable. The words 
point out directions of thought rather than lay down its 
limits. Here is a fundamental difficulty w^ith the author- 
ity assigned such dogmas. The Scriptures are not philo- 
sophical in phraseology, nor would the matter be much 
helped if they were. They give no definitions to their 
words ; these words search our own experience for ex- 
planation. Their meaning will be as full and correct as 
our thinking can make it, no more so. This is a fact fatal 
to absolute truth, when the conceptions are complex ; and 
to the use of Biblical assertions as the unilluminated 
premxises of final conclusions. Words are the counters of 
thought, and the word, in our use of it, can be no more 
exact than is the thinking in which it takes part. 

Return to the definition. What do we understand by 
the words, spirit, infinite, eternal ? 

It may be the slightness, rather than the exactness, of 
our apprehension of these words that causes us to be 
so content with our comprehension of them. Many 
thoughtful minds are very much baffled by them, and 
systems of philosophy turn on the intelligibility or unin- 
telligibility of these ideas. This fact is no serious diffi- 
culty so far as the wholesome, nutritive processes of each 
mind are concerned, but is entirely fatal, if we undertake 
to reach results authoritative for all minds. 

When we pass on to those other words, '' unchangeable 
in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, 
and truth,'* we are dealing with conceptions so rich and 
comprehensive that while we grasp much we miss far 
more. They are most unfit words on which to fasten a 
deductive process in an exhaustive way. Who but the 



DOGMATISM. 12$ 

perfectly wise can tell what wisdom involves ; who but 
the completely good can lay down the laws of goodness ? 
We might as well attempt to infer the next phase of 
a sunset from the one now before us, as the succeeding 
methods of God from previous ones. In each case, in 
spite of all causal connections, w^e must sit quietly by and 
see the vision unfold itself in its own inexhaustible glories. 

In what sense is God unchangeable ? If we were to say 
that he is infinitely flexible, w^e should have uttered a truth 
of equal scope. 

What is meant by the unchangeableness of the divine 
character can only be understood by seeing how far stead- 
fastness Is an element of perfection ; and this we must 
learn from a growing knowledge of the physical and 
spiritual conditions of our being. It need not be urged 
further that we have no definitions of holiness, justice, 
goodness, truth, other than those which our own experi- 
ence supplies, and that it is the ever ripening fruit of that 
experience to impart to these words a deeper and more 
purified significance. There can be, then, in our knowl- 
edge of God's moral attributes — the most essential form 
of religious truth — nothing more final and profound than 
our present experiences of moral qualities can furnish. 
We readily recognize the difificulty of imparting just con- 
ceptions of God to a barbarous people. The embarrass- 
ment is the same in kind when the most cultivated races 
and persons approach these ultimate problems of life, 
these transcendent truths of being. We should see little 
significance in immortality, if we had already penetrated 
the revelation of God to its very core. Theology, because 
its fundamental ideas are so profound, finds in them no 
fitting premises for a reasoning that is to reach at once 
finalities. 



126 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

This is already seen in such a doctrine as that of the 
Trinity. The most explicit statements are the most in- 
adequate, and are hardly intelligible, not to say con- 
vincing. The Scriptural data on which the doctrine rests 
are exceedingly loose and figurative, and give no premises 
to exact statement. They cannot be subjected to the 
pressure of a logical process without yielding absurdity 
on this side and illusion on that. One must be left to 
make such uses of an article of faith of this order as his 
own thoughts call for. To break in analysis through its 
dramatic, representative imagery is to incur the utmost 
risk of folly, and is to carry with us no authority whatever. 

No better example in the '* Systematic Theology ** re- 
ferred to of unsafe deduction can be found than that 
offered by the doctrines of regeneration, justification, and 
sanctification. Regeneration is virtually re-creation by 
the Divine Spirit. Justification is a forensic — forensic ! — 
act made possible by imparting to us the righteousness of 
Christ ; and sanctification is due to the power of God 
over and above the power of the second causes concerned. 
Conclusions like these are derived from each other, and 
rest on a special philosophy of human powers. If that 
philosophy is correct they may be correct ; if it is untrue, 
they cannot stand. If the acts of a free agent are fully 
embraced in the decrees of God, as Dr. Hodge thinks, 
then what we call freedom, responsibility, guilt, virtue, 
are very different things from the conceptions we cover 
by these words, if we believe that the human mind has 
the power to choose between good and evil, and that the 
problem of a moral life is wrought out at this very point 
of choice. We are not discussing the correctness of the 
two views ; we are only insisting that each of them must 
turn, in its authority, on a sound philosophy of human 



DOGMATIS?^!. 12/ 

life. No theologian, in these and kindred doctrines, can 
escape the quagmire which surrounds this question of 
freedom. He must plunge in with the rest of us, and 
make what strides and strokes he can for the farther 
shore. Scripture does not help him over this obstacle. 
Its language is popular, and, like popular language, waits 
for philosophical interpretation. In arguing for freedom 
we should certainly urge the considerations that this 
belief gives a much more adequate meaning to language, 
is a better expression of the popular thought, and cor- 
responds more directly with the commands and exhorta- 
tions of Scripture. We certainly should not say that we 
were entitled to an affirmative conclusion on the ground 
of the injunctions of the Bible. We should recognize the 
fact that these words, and all words, remain to be inter- 
preted by the .very relations which they cover, and that 
we are not safe in our conclusions till the two are brought 
together. Certainly, then, we can concede no authority 
whatever to the verbal inferences of Dr. Hodge beyond 
that which attaches to the philosophy which sustains 
them. It is a grave abuse of inspiration, even if we be- 
lieve it to cover the very words of the text, to affirm that 
it precludes our interpretation of the text. This, at least, 
remains, and must stand or fall by its own wisdom. 

The '' Systematic Theology '* sustains its dogma of sancti- 
fication by such passages as these : '' And the very God 
of peace sanctify you wholly." ^ ^' Now the God of peace, 
that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that 
great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the 
everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good 
work, to do his will, working in you that which is well 
pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ." "" Words like 

* I Thess. v., 23. ^ Heb. xiii., 20, 21. 



128 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

these are to be rendered, and can only be rendered, in 
the light of our own experience. We are to improve this 
rendering by getting nearer and yet nearer to the very 
facts of life, and the method of God in them. This is 
the divine discipline of living, and a discipline often 
grievously interrupted by theology. Its predetermined 
temper reads into profound words like these, a narrow 
rendering which is termed systematic merely because it 
has forced the meaning into a logical form far too strait 
for it. 

The dogma of justification, as a forensic act, springs out 
of the dogma of a supernatural regeneration, and from 
the two arises the dogma of an atonement, in which the 
sufferings and righteousness of Christ take the place 
of our own righteousness and sufferings. Thus we btiild 
up a theological block-house in defiance of ethical prin- 
ciples, and we pass righteousness backward and forward 
as if it were a commodity of the market. Ethics insists 
on regeneration as a correction of the soul within the soul 
itself. If it is not so purified it remains unregenerate. 
The moral law pushes its way into the soul of man as the 
form and force of its life. To have moral life is to have 
it, is to enter by clear consciousness and well ordered 
obedience into truth. Strangely enough, under this sys- 
tematic view, sin and righteousness can be imputed, and 
when so imputed they are just as potent as when real. 
The forensic penalty cannot be overcome by forgiveness. 
That is, the purely formal element is more unchangeable 
than the substantial element. Sin can be gotten rid of by 
imputation, but being imputed cannot be escaped without 
punishment. Ethics, in the face of all these cunning ways, 
affirms the inherent character of moral action ; that sin 
and righteousness are states inseparable from the conduct 



DOGMATISM. 1 29 

in which they inhere, and thus the consequences of action 
follow on the actions themselves. Forgiveness turns on 
repentance, and is until seventy times seven. Why ? be- 
cause true repentance begets a new life. 

Our purpose, however, is not to argue these points. 
What we wish to affirm is that they are one and all open 
to argument, that the conclusions we reach are no sounder 
than the premises on which they rest, and that the truth is 
found by an explanatory process which unites the entire 
work and the entire word of God. Whether guilt de- 
mands a punishment definite in amount and in no way to 
be avoided ; whether this penalty can be transferred ; 
what are the fruits of repentance ; these and kindred 
inquiries are to be answered by a right rendering of hu- 
man history as well as inspired thought. The '^ Systematic 
Theology '* is in no way entitled, as a sound deduction 
from undeniable premises, to the certainty of any of its 
conclusions. An implication of this order is simply the 
lack of intelligence or of fairness. 

Dr. Hodge, in defence of his doctrine of justification, 
gives a few passages of Scripture, which hardly bear on 
the subject otherwise than verbally : ^' I will not justify 
the wicked," ^ ^' Wisdom is justified of her children." "" 
" But he, walling to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And 
who is my neighbor?"^ He then proceeds to put him- 
self under the shelter of St. Paul : '' Knowing that a man 
is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith 
•of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, 
that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and 
not by the works of the law ; for by the works of the law 
shall no flesh be justified." ' '' For in Christ Jesus neither 

^ Ex. xxiii., 7. - Matt, xvi., 19. 

2 Lukex., 29. ■* Gal. ii., 16. 

9 



130 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision ; but 
faith, which worketh by love." ^ '' Even as David also 
describeth the blessedness of the man unto whom God 
imputeth righteousness without works.'* ^ 

St. Paul is the favorite apostle of the theologian. Prob- 
ably more extreme dogmas have been extracted from the 
epistles of St. Paul than from all the Bible besides. They 
readily lend themselves to this use, or, as it may quite 
as fittingly be termed, this abuse. A logical precision 
is referred to these epistles which is very foreign to them, 
while the exact conditions under which they were writ* 
ten, and the immediate purposes they were intended to 
subserve, are largely overlooked. The justness of the 
precise criticism we are now enforcing, a neglect of facts 
in the making up of dogma, is very conspicuous in the 
manner in which the words of St. Paul are employed. 

In the wide, changeable field of religious truth, those 
principles will receive especial emphasis at any one time 
by any one writer which have gotten peculiar force in his 
own thoughts, and in the demands of his own experience. 
They are necessarily, therefore, for the moment thrown 
out of proportion with other principles, and may seem to 
assume a character more fundamental than really belongs 
to them. Even when the discussion itself does not 
exaggerate them, the very fact of the discussion causes 
them to fill the eye, to the exclusion of other things. 
This partial and disproportionate presentation of truth 
pervades human thought ; and when it appears in the 
writings of an apostle, it becomes more than usually mis- 
chievous, because of the assumption of the completeness 
and symmetry of the Scriptures. Two things are over- 
looked in the use of the writings of St. Paul which can 

^ Gal. v., 6. - Rom. iv., 6. 



DOGMATISM. I3I 

never be safely neglected — the force of individual tend- 
encies in the writer and the force of historic circumstances. 
These two things give us the proper background for the 
apprehension of the words of any man. If they are for 
gotten, and, like an ambient mist, allowed to mingle with 
the very things affirmed, they are sure to disguise and 
distort the truths involved. This transient force of 
principles, due to powerful prevalent conditions, is seen 
in the epistles of St. Paul, especially in the epistles to 
the Romans and to the Galatians. The very form and 
purpose of an epistle tend to give it local, personal color- 
ing, and to separate it widely from a systematic statement 
of truth. A doctrine of inspiration which attaches slight 
weight to the naturalism of times, persons, and purposes, 
exposes the theologian to great danger. This fact is 
clearly illustrated in the uses which have been made of 
the writings of St. Paul. They have been treated as if 
they were a collection of aphorisms, each seen in its own 
light, and not a glowing discussion of urgent practical 
problems of somewhat narrow compass. The local 
elem.ents are not allowed their true weight. The human 
conditions are permitted to color the divine message, 
greatly to its limitation. Few inspired writers are more 
stimulating than St. Paul, if we share his freedom and 
force of movement. For this very reason his words are 
least of all fit to be taken in a detached way and reduced 
into dogma by forceful deduction. 

St. Paul was a man of intense temper. His entire 
experience confirmed this ardor of conviction. He did 
not take religious truth lightly, nor urge it in a reserved 
manner. Before his conversion, and after it, his opinions 
pressed his own mind and brought corresponding pressure 
to the minds of other men. He was an apostle of the 



132 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

truth, in a pre-eminent sense — warm in feeling, aggressive 
in thought, bold in action. Whatever phase his life 
assumed, it assumed with an energy that paid little heed 
to reservations and proportions. His description of him- 
self is, '' As touching the law, a Pharisee ; concerning zeal, 
persecuting the church ; touching the righteousness which 
was in the law, blameless.*' ' 

The circumstances of the life of St. Paul were such as 
to give the fullest expression to this ardent, spiritual 
habit of mind, and to involve him deeply and constantly 
in the most circumscribed and bitter religious contro- 
versy of his time, the relation of the Jewish law to the 
law of Christ, the liberty of every man with the truth. 
His own early method of thought and connection with 
the Jewish leaders, and his later position as the apostle of 
the Gentiles, forced him into the heat of this discussion, 
and compelled him to bear, both on its theoretical and 
practical side, the brunt of the conflict. There thus fell 
to his lot the most intense personal obloquy and 
hostility. 

The law stood with the Jews and with St. Paul, not 
for ethical law, as we understand it, but for a very com- 
plex, extended, and vexatious set of commands, that 
penetrated into the entire life of a devotee, and took 
complete possession of religious action, to the exclusion 
of anything like insight and personal liberty. A free, 
vigorous mind must fully adopt such a system, or find 
itself in irreconcilable hostility to it. Whatever conces- 
sions St. Paul might have been willing, personally, to 
make to this Jewish ritual of life, as a preacher of the 
Gospel to the Gentiles, he was compelled to antagonize 
it. The universal nurture of grace must not be destroyed 

^ Philip, iii., 5, 6. 



DOGMATISM. 1 33 

by the nurture of a worn-out national faith. If the 
Gentile, in his discipleship, had been compelled to accept 
the Jewish law, not only would it have laid on him a 
burden impossible to be borne, the very effort to bear it 
would at once have obscured the gift of grace, and closed 
to the vision of the mind the true path of life. Such had 
been its effect, in a large measure, on the Jews themselves, 
though the law stood to them, by virtue of their history, 
in a relation it could never sustain to another people. It 
fell to St. Paul to discuss and re-discuss the bearings of 
the Jewish law on the grace of Christ, and to resist the 
insidious efforts to straiten the divine method by the 
devices of men. This controversy involved the general 
question, which has arisen so often and in so many forms, 
— the connection of the inner life with the acts which 
express it. 

This discussion has widened in religious history into an 
effort to define the relation of faith and works, and has 
owed its extreme position, its obscurity, obstinacy, and 
gross errors, not to its inherent difficulty, but to the want 
of spirituality in men. A very little insight carries the 
mind to a position from which any conflict between faith 
and works wholly disappears. The warmth of daylight 
dispels the mist at once. Works are the inevitable ex- 
pression of faith, and faith is the living force of w^orks. 
A fact which has helped to keep this controversy alive, 
' and added so much to its confusion, has been the min- 
gling in it of the moral and the ritual elements of law. 
These two terms stand, in any system which embraces 
them both, in very different relations to conduct and 
religious nurture. The Jewish law not only embraced 
them both, it overshadowed them both with endless tra- 
ditions, which attached the utmost importance to multi- 



134 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

plied forms of action, aside from the spirit which animated 
them. Thus an authority was attributed to the tradition 
which belonged only to the ritual, and to the ritual which 
properly attached only to the moral command. Confusion 
of thought prevailed everywhere. The least and the 
largest injunctions were made to.rest on the same author, 
ity, and an act which subserved no purpose of nurture 
was regarded as binding as an ethical precept. The con- 
ventional minds of men have again and again fallen into 
a hopeless quagmire in considering the primitive laws of 
God, and their own foolish extensions of them. They 
have failed to vindicate the freedom of each mind with 
the truth. In fact the freedom of the individual has not 
been possible to him, embraced as he has been in a com- 
munity, groping its obscure way in the most intense dark- 
ness. Men have been compelled to take each other by 
the hand, and stumble on as best they could together. 
The purely moral element of the Jewish law, by its asso- 
ciation with rites and traditions, lost very largely its moral 
quality, and became acts to be rendered in external 
obedience rather than with inner affections. The law was 
thus a worthless body bereft of the inner spirit of life. 

All that St. Paul has to say about the law, and the 
works of the law, as contrasted with faith in Christ and 
the grace of Christ, should be interpreted in view of this 
accumulated blight of national bigotry, and the complete 
confusion into which the Jewish mind had fallen as to the 
law in its triple elements — eternal principle, disciplinary 
rite, and worthless tradition. The law was treated as a 
whole by the apostle in the manner in which it was 
regarded by the Jews, and so condemned in the form 
and temper of its use. The salient feature of that use 
was observance divorced from love. 



n 



DOGMATISM. I35 

If, however, we read the epistle to the Romans with 
that insight which should belong to us, taught by the 
history of two thousand years ; if we make the epistle 
thoroughly consistent ^ with itself by subordinating it to 
its primary. purpose, we. shall have no difficulty in seeing 
that faith with the apostle means the inner hold of the 
mind on spiritual^ truth ; that works, as opposed to it, 
stand for formal obedience to the Jewish law ; and that 
redemption, righteousness, justification, are all spiritual 
states, and not forensic relations. Indeed, the forensic 
temper was the very thing with which the whole epistle 
was at strife. If Paul had recognized the work of Christ 
as another expression of this formal method, he would 
have been at bottom concurrent with the Jewish feeling. 
What he was struggling for was the freedom of the soul 
Avith truth, with Christ, and with God. Whatever asser- 
tions obscure this fact arose from the great darkness 
which had fallen on the field of human conduct, a dark- 
ness which could not be lifted at once and equally in all 
directions. The light was caught by snatches, and came 
streaming in by floods, but had not become a mild, uni- 
versal presence. Paul was simply pressing forward toward 
the mark of his high calling. 

The life-long conflict which St. Paul found occasion to 
wage with the narrow methods of Judaism and blind 
belief in favoritism in divine things finds freest and most 
extended expression in the epistle to the Romans. This 
epistle, if interpreted from the midstream of the apostolic 
feeling, is not difficult of apprehension. If it is approached 
wath a subtile, rather than with a profound, spirit, as some- 
thing to be verbally weighed out for the dialectic process 
to compound, we shall meet with much confusion and 
darkness and extreme doctrine. 



136 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

The apostle first insists that all men have a measure of 
spiritual life, and so find the conditions of obedience and 
disobedience. He then affirms that all men are judged 
by the manner in which they respond to these motives. 
The advantage of the Jew lies in a larger revelation of 
the divine mind. But no man has been faithful to the 
truth. 

All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. 
All, therefore, Jew and Gentile, call for the discipline of 
Christ, the discipline of forgiveness and love. The point 
is then made, which is the essential truth of the dis^ 
cussion, that redemption is inward grace and not a 
product of obedience under the law. It is here that 
confusion of thought so easily enters. The works of the 
law are to be interpreted as the complex, burdensome,, 
and artificial impositions of the Jewish service, rendered 
in a perfunctory way, and not as a loving recognition of 
the will of God in our own moral qohstitution. The 
moral element, so far as it enters into this obedience, 
enters on the' formal side, and is swallowed up in a cum- 
bersome system of observances. That it is the Jewish 
law, in its mixed elements and punctilious exactions, that 
was in the mind of the apostle, is seen in the words,. 
*^ Behold, thou art Called a Jew, and restest in the 
law.^'' 

The contrast which the apostle institutes, and which 
was made plain by the gross^ facts with which he was 
dealing, was precisely this between the spirit of trust, 
issuing in real obedience to God, and a formal observance 
of certain commands that carried with it no love of 
righteousness. The justification of which the apostle 
speaks is grace hidden irt the heart, is a renewal of the 

' Rom. ii., 17. 



DOGMATISM. 1 3/ 

entire temper, and not a formal relation to God. There 
is in the discussion not the least separation between spirit 
and conduct, — it was this very separation on the part of 
the Jews that occasioned the controversy — but the affir- 
mation rather that the spirit carries the conduct with it. 
If w^e try to secure conduct independently of the temper 
of trust, conduct becomes dead, and we are swept in 
under a universal condemnation. If we accept the true 
dependence of outward life on inward faith, we establish 
both. Abraham was not justified by works, technical 
obedience, because his acceptance preceded the law under 
which the observance arose. It was a living trust in God 
which gave him divine favor. So we have access by faith 
into his grace, wherein we stand, and rejoice in the hope 
of God. 

The apostle, in the fifth chapter, dwells on the love of 
Christ, and the sweep of its power. That this movement 
of "the soul upward in the love of Christ is to be inter- 
preted in a spiritual way, and not in forensic fashion, is 
abundantly shown by explicit tleclarations and by the 
entire force of the argument. Sin came by the contagion 
of sin ; disobedience followed as the entail of disobedi- 
ence. So righteousness comes as the fruit of righteous- 
ness, and love follows the free gift of love. The w^hole 
argument is a struggle wath a formal, mechanical way of 
looking at things, a method that puts acts in tlje place of 
the feelings that vitalize them, and exterior and national 
relations for interior and personal ones. We cannot, 
therefore, admit that justification with the apostle stands 
for a judicial act without restoring to the heart of the 
discussion that^very thing which it was designed to expel. 
Understand the words spiritually, and the argument 
holds throughout : understand them formally, and con^ 



138 ' THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

fusion and contradiction enter everywhere. Justification 
is a justification of life. It is not, in the attitude implied, 
to be distinguished from righteousness. God is righteous 
(just), and the maker righteous (the justifier) of him who 
believeth in Jesus. To be righteous is to be just, and to 
be just is to be justified. '^The free gift is of many 
offences unto justification." ^ How can we suppose that 
the justification here intended is merely formal, and so 
leaves the inner problem of life to still be resolved ? 

The following chapter dwells at length on the living 
character of this redemption. ^' How shall we, that are 
dead to sin, live any longer therein ? " ^ We are baptized 
into the death of Christ — his rejection of a sensuous life 
— that we may walk with him in newness of life. We are 
dead, indeed, unto sin, but alive unto God, through 
Jesus Christ our Lord. Being made free from sin and 
become servants to God, we have fruit unto holiness, and 
the end everlasting life. ' The law is thus displaced, in 
the deadness of its letter, by a life rendered in newness of 
spirit, and so the righteousness of the law — righteousness 
sought after by the 'law — is fulfilled in us, who walk not 
after the flesh but aft^^r the spirit. ^* To be carnally 
minded is death, to be spiritually minded is life and 
peace/' ^ ^^ Ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so 
be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man I 
have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.''* ^^ As 
many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons 
of God." ^ If we allow these words to be, what they seem 
to be, the inner light of the entire topic, our interpretation 
becomes convincing and stimulating, and we push our 
way through the accumulated cobwebs of dogma with a 

^ Rom. v., 16. '-^ Rom. vi., 2. ^Rom. viii., 6. 

*Rom. viii., 9. ^Rom. viii., 14. 



DOGMATISM. 1 39 

free, elastic step. We have grasped the fundamental 
truth which the Jew would not receive — that our relation 
to God is a personal, spiritual one. Henceforward the 
confusion about faith and works seems to us one of those 
blind passages into which men are constantly stumbling 
as they grope their way upward. The righteousness 
which is of faith does not ascend into heaven, or descend 
into hell, in search of Christ or a way of life by him ; it 
finds his word of truth close at hand, in the very heart of 
the believer. This new feeling of certainty arises from a 
strictly historical, and a collective, rendering of the epistle. 
It is quite true that a more narrow meaning can fre- 
quently be read into the words of the apostle, taken as 
proof-texts ; but in the very degree in which this is done, 
we put ourselves alongside those against whom the 
epistle was directed. The epistle is a plea for life against 
a dogma that, in its dry, stiff contraction, was extinguish- 
' ing life and giving occasion to the spiritual fungi of 
division, pride, and bitterness. Some passages must be 
' interpreted more narrowly than the first force of the 
words may seem to allow, in order to bring them into 
I harmony with the epistle as a whole. But this is a result 
i that ought not to disturb us when we are dealing with a 
j mind so fervid, so concentrate in its action, and so little 
i critical, as that of St. Paul. Thus in the ninth chapter, 
I when the apostle is asserting the freedom of God against 
I those who would bind him over under promises to the 
; Jewish nation, his words gather a scope which seems to 
I make the actions of God arbitrary. '' O man, who art 
thou that repliest against God ? Shall the thing formed 
say to him who formed it. Why hast thou made me 
thus?" ^ This is meeting a factious temper somewhat in 

' Rom. ix., 20. 



I40 



THE NEW THEOLOGY. 



its own spirit. But the argument does not call for arbi« 
trary action on the part of God ; rather the reverse. If 
God is arbitrary in his choices, then might he accept the 
Jew arbitrarily without any change in character ; but if 
he himself is perfectly reasonable, he must look for sound- 
ness of life in those who are granted access to him. The 
example of Jacob and Esau, accepted and rejected ante- 
cedently to any manifestation of character, is entirely ^ 
good for the purpose of showing that the liberty of God 
is not swallowed up in compacts ; but we use it to the 
subversion of truth when we infer from it unreason in 
God. We do much better to believe that the apostle 
was looking at the history narrowly to enforce his own 
conclusion. 

There has been much, too much, weight attached to an 
alleged discrepancy of opinion and division of policy 
between St. Paul and St. James. St. James evidently 
held firmly the very gist of the truth. His statement — 
Show me thy faith without thy works, and I will show 
you my faith by my works — touches at once and un- 
erringly the very marrow of the topic. Show me thy ? 
health without strength, and I will show you my health 
by my strength. What more remains to be said ? It is 
only by a misleading side-light that St. Paul is made to 
attach any other office to faith than this of breathing 
itself out as life. The entire relation is so simple and 
unequivocal that it requires some external pressure to 
pervert it in vision. The two things, faith and the fruits 
of faith, like the images in the two eyes, will fall together 
of their own accord, if no violence is used. While we 
may be surprised at the persevering folly of men in 
separating them, we may readily see that this division is 
an illusion of interest or of indolence. The separation is 



DOGMATISM. I4I 

not unlike that between real value and value in use in a 
currency. The effort to secure a permanent paper value 
has been a persistent folly in commerce. The formal and 
the substantial have been found indivisible. Value has 
slipped from the promise to pay the moment a suspicion 
of its fulfilment has overtaken it. It is not the images of 
things, but things themselves, that men wish to deal with, 
and any want of substance means to them want of reality. 
We cannot turn works into a sound spiritual currency 
otherwise than by hiding under them a living faith. 

The practical relation of St. James to the Jewish law — 
which came at once under discussion because of its burden- 
some formal element — was very different from that of St. 
Paul, partly because of a difference of character, and partly 
because of the circumstances under which the two were 
placed. The very zeal with which St. Paul devoted him- 
self to the law in his earlier life evinced an ardor of tem- 
perament that rendered him equally impatient of it when 
he found it embarrassing the work he had undertaken. 

St. James, trained to a quiet observance of its minute 
regulations, not only suffered little annoyance from them, 
he doubtless made them terms, artificial as they were, in 
the expression of a potent and profound religious temper. 
The law thus fulfilled in him its best possible service. 
As he confined his labors to the vicinity of Jerusalem, his 
acceptance of the law aided, rather than hindered, him in 
his work. He dealt chiefly with those who could make, 
and were disposed to make, the same use of it as himself, 
and who found, therefore, no occasion for any violent 
transition in the forms of piety. Such changes in the out- 
ward conditions of life are very trying, and the demand, 
in connection with them, was exactly reversed with the 
' disciples of St. James and those of St. Paul. The former 



142 thp: new theology. 

would seek to be excused from any unnecessary oppro- 
brium by rejecting the religious usages about them, and 
the latter would as earnestly desire that no unusual and 
vexatious customs should be imposed upon them. The 
form, therefore, which identically the same spirit would 
assume in the two cases would be quite distinct. Faith 
in Christ would assert, in the one instance, its liberty to 
obey, and, in the other, its liberty to disobey. Both obe- 
dience and disobedience were equally within the scope of 
religious liberty. When the synod at Jerusalem adjusted 
the question, it singled out those customs which had a 
moral force, and enjoined them to the exclusion of all 
indifferent rules of conduct. They thus put a marked 
distinction between the ethical command and the tradi- 
tional custom. 

In the case of St. John we have a life which lay some- 
what between that of St. Paul and that of St. James. He 
dealt with both Jews and Gentiles. His own disposition 
was of that loving, emotional order, which led him to aline 
of conduct neither intellectually critical, on the one hand, 
nor narrowly observant of customs, on the other. The 
words of Christ which he treasures are those addressed to 
spiritual insight and to the affections ; words which call for 
a close union of the life of the disciple with that of the 
master. This message of love is on his lips the supreme 
one. It is a message that admits in conduct no separa- 
tion between substance and form, and makes light in 
theory, as it does in practice, of differences in the manner 
of expressing an overruling sentiment. 

Whenever in the history of the Church the religious life 
has cumbered itself with much serving, a washing of pots 
and kettles, there has come the occasion for a fresh asser- 
tion of the doctrine of faith, and often, unfortunately, for 



DOGMATISM. 1 43 

its extreme assertion. Thus when Luther found himself 
confronted with a traffic in spiritual things, with works of 
penance and works of merit w^hich were not works of 
virtue, or works of virtue throw^i out of their true relation 
to morality; when men were losing all spiritual values in 
a surreptitious currency of empty promises, he met the 
tendency by a renewed assertion of the fundamental 
character of faith. In keeping with the division of 
thought that had already taken place, he took an extreme 
position, lost sympathy with St. James, perverted St. 
Paul, and fell into the error of supposing that faith itself 
might have a formal value aside from the inner and outer 
changes it w^orks. We rarely correct an error from the 
midway position of truth, but more often from the ex- 
treme position of the opposite error. Thus the error 
itself often re-introduces itself in its very rectification. 

From time to time ritualism seeks to offer a more 
visible and decisive movement toward a religious life, and 
men are then restored to personal freedom only by a 
more positive affirmation of our direct union to God in 
faith. Hardly anything discloses more completely the 
ease with which thought becomes superficial and inconse- 
quent than the fact that the re-assertion of faith so often 
falls into the error it seeks to escape, and makes of itself 
a definite act with forensic consequences. The truth 
embarrasses us as much by its simplicity as by its 
complexity. 

The topic now considered, the relation of faith and 
works, is to be understood, as presented by St. Paul, in 
connection with the narrow idea of works which held pos- 
session of the Jewish mind. The history of the Church 
for many generations was gathered up in this monstrous 
perversion, judged from a rational point of view, of the 



144 'IHE NEW THEOLOGY. 

religious life, which St. Paul was called upon to confront. 
The same question may, indeed, be raised in connection 
with pure morality, but only as that morality separates 
itself from its inner life in the affections ; or struggles to 
exclude one injunction by a more exact obedience to an- 
other. Works, as faulty, are only the curdling, in one 
fashion or another, of the milk of human kindness. 

The doctrine of the atonement is especially one which 
should be studied inductively, in a historic spirit. If we 
look upon the Jewish sacrifices as directly ordered of God 
for the very purpose of prefiguring the work of Christ, 
and leading up to it, we shall give a very different place to 
the sacrificial element in the atonement from that which 
we shall assign it, if Jewish history rests on natural causes, 
and is closely interlocked with the general history of the 
world. We thus regard the sacrifices of the Jew^ish ritual 
as due to the same tendencies of thought which gave 
occasion, in other nations, to similar forms. While the 
Jews are remarkably distinguished from other peoples by 
a comparatively free entrance of religious truth through 
men extraordinarily moved in their own experience by the 
Divine Spirit, they are closely allied to the nations about 
them, and to their own period of development, by very I 
limited conceptions of the character of God, and narrow 
ways of approach to him. Studied historically, sacrifices 
are at no time a luminous and sufficient form of worship, 
a just presentation of man's relations to God, but simply 
one of those early ways of approach which offered them- 
selves to men in their ignorance and their fear. Sacrifices 
are the natural output of the religious idea working its 
way upward in darkness and doubt. Ignorance led men 
to believe that God called for some kind of conciliation, 
and that a sacrifice might subserve this purpose ; and fear 



II 



DOGMATISM. I45 

prompted them to be very full and circumspect in this 
method of approach to God. The ritual of the temple 
service was thus allied to that of many another temple, 
appealed in the same way to prevalent notions, rooted 
itself in the same soil of obscure thought, was open to the 
same abuses, and transcended other forms of discipline 
chiefly in being accompanied^ in the instruction of the 
prophets, with far more insight and spiritual life. 

Sacrifices were capable, with all their misconceptions, of 
conveying truth ; they were a religious training, though 
an insufficient one. It was their very insufficiency which 
made the presence and teachings of Christ so needful and 
so revolutionary. Though God does not call for propi- 
tiation, nor need to be turned from his anger by a gift, 
men do need reconciliation with him. Pressed by this 
necessity, they inevitably conceive the anger of God as the 
difficulty to be overcome. God is angry with the wicked 
every day. They have not reached the spiritual elevation 
at which they can separate this assertion into its two 
terms, righteous rejection and personal resentment, see 
the incompatibility of the two, and at the same tiihe 
understand that this affirmation of anger, inadmissible in 
Its precise form, stands for the fundamental fact of the 
moral world. A love that is abhorrent of sin and so com- 
passionate of the sinner, that forces its way between dis- 
obedience and the disobedient, that vanquishes transgres- 
sion by winning the transgressor, is beyond their thought, 
is too bright a revelation for their steady beholding. 
This is the revelation in Christ, and the ritual prepared 
the way for it because it stood for a sincere effort to draw 
near to God, and because it largely failed of success. It 
thus pushed men forward to another struggle. Paul thus 

says of it, that it was a burden that neither we nor our 
10 



146 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

fathers were able to bear ; and that it was a servant to 
lead us to Christ. 

If we attach full weight to the historic circumstances 
which give occasion and coloring to the truth, our inter- 
pretation of Scripture will be much modified. We shall 
npt look upon a sacrificial system as enclosing the very 
work of Christ, but as giving way to it ; not as reflecting 
the truth with precision, but as leading the mind to search 
for it in a new direction. The transition will be a real 
trarlsition from a. lower to a higher position, from a partial 
to a corrected conception, from the altar to the foot of the 
cross, from God to be conciliated to God conciliating all 
things in his eternal love. , 

Thus Christ fulfils the law and the prophets in the 
highest possible sense. He uses them as steps of ascent 
into the presence of God ; he enables us to see the 
crass history of the world as ~the rough rounds of the 
ladder on which angels are ascending and descending 
between us and God. When Christ came, it was inevita- 
ble, in the great effort of making the transition- from- 
ritualistic to spiritualistic worship, from our gifts to God 
to God's gifts to us, that the very most should be made 
of the religious ideas that had been gained in connection! 
with sacrifices, and that sacrificial forms should be stretched 1 
to their utmost significance. All the light that was in the 
relation must be diligently used to open the way into] 
perfect light, and to help the mind to discern the real! 
dependence of the two systems that sought to compassf 
the one essential thing, reconciliation. It would also as 
inevitably happen that the old bottles would not contain 
the new wine, and that in their unwise use they would be 
burst and the wine spilt. The injunction of Christ was 
very much in poiiat, and very earnest, Put new wine in 



DOGMATISM. I47 

new bottles. When Christ is made a sacrifice to concili- 
ate God, we have poured the new vintage into the old 
vessels. When Christ is a sacrifice, a sacrifice on the> 
divine side to conciliate and guide men, and draw them 
within the bonds of his love and wisdom, we have our new 
wine in fresh receptacles, and are rich with the gifts of 
Heaven. It is a matter largely of the historic sense how 
we understand the divine Revelation. Our narrow way 
of studying the divine record hides half its light and im- 
pedes the growing power which it is waiting to spread 
over the whole world. We should better understand the 
command to preach the Gospel to every creature, if we 
better understood the fact that the whole creation groan- 
eth and travaileth together in pain until now, waiting 
for the adoption. The same inadequate ideas, the same 
obscure ways,, the same hesitancy, .uncertainty, and doubt 
in the presence of truth, have been and are everywhere 
among men. Yet along this Hne of revelation, of pro- 
phetic labor and constant transition, has the good seed, 
in the fulness of growth, broken forth Avith new flowers 
and new fruitage, and filled the earth with its fragrance. 
We are the heralds of a spiritual creation, the heralds 
of Christ. The dogmatic tendency must find correction 
in the historic spirit, or it becomes a laborious raking 
together of cast-off husks and empty stubble, as if these 
still held the living germs. 

There is one more consideration closely associated with 
the inductive and historic temper which remains to be 
enforced on those who construct systematic theplogy, and 
that is the extent to which figurative language necessarily 
enters religious truth. There is no end to the confusion 
which has been occasioned in philosophy by the fact that 
language, first shaped in sensuous uses, has been trans- 



148 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

ferred to intellectual relations only partly analogous to 
them. Thus the activities and laws of mind have been 
likened in inadmissible ways to those of matter. It has 
been found a most difficult thing— much of sound philoso- 
phy lies in it — to make a clean transition from matter to 
mind, from mind to matter, without losing the distinctive 
qualities of either, or breaking the union of the two. 
Men experience a similar difficulty in grasping the 
spiritual truth which lies enclosed in a concrete fact 
without carrying with it more of the limitations of the 
fact than belong to it. If they believe in spirits, they 
believe also in ghosts, and shortly huddle together with 
starting eyes while some horror of spiritualism passes 
before them. As the devils of old are represented as 
especially reluctant to leave the bodies of their victims, 
and, when driven out, as' taking refuge in a herd of 
swine that ran down a steep place and perished in the 
sea, so men in their, spiritual blindness cling closely to 
the familiar forms of things, and when forced loose from 
them, accept some still more ijiadequate image till they 
are swallowed up in a sea of sensuous relations. One 
may say of this sort of offence, that it must needs come, 
but woe unto the man by whom it cometh. We must 
approach spiritual things through physical things, but in 
the very instant of attaining them we must leave behind 
us the parted simile, as the growing plant the integument 
it has just broken. 

The first example we adduce for enforcement is the 
doctrine of covenants. The discipline of the world is 
continuous. It cannot be otherwise. A higher stage 
of training, unsupported by a lower one, would fail at 
once. Transitions of any considerable importance in the 
moral world are very difficult of accomplishment. When 



DOGMATISM. I49 

the Jewish system and the Christian system are spoken of 
as distinct covenants, the one of works and the other of 
grace, we are not to understand the words in any exact 
way. They only express a new emphasis, a change of 
dominant idea, under which one and the same process goes 
forward. If we dwell upon this word covenant, transfer 
it from a broad to a narrow meaning, and assume that the 
gifts of God turn upon a distinct contract, we shall shortly 
find ourselves groping about among very limited and very 
arbitrary relations in a disappointing search for the divine 
mind. The figure is to be dealt with lightly, with delicate 
touch, and transcended at once. Nothing can be safely 
drawn from it as premises. We must hit away from it, 
as the bird strikes air with his wing as he rises. 

In the Scriptural presentations of our relations to Christ 
we have a great variety of figurative expressions, all yield- 
ing some light, none, yielding complete light. In order to 
receive what each has to impart, we must understand that 
all are inexact and inadequate. Christ is our ransom. 
He purchased. us with his blood. We are redeemed, not 
by silver and gold, but with his precious blood. He was 
made a curse for us. He bore our sins on the tree. He 
is our passover; a sacrifice to God as a sweet-smelling 
savor. He is the lamb of God that taketh away the ^ns 
of the world. He was lifted up, as the serpent in the 
wilderness, that we might look unto him. He purges our 
cpnsciences from dead works. We enter by him into the 
holiest. He is the end of the law for righteousness. To 
these relations are to be added those in which he is wont 
to speak of himself. He is the vine, the door, the shep- 
herd, the light, the way, the truth, and the life. These 
images are to be all harmonized in the doctrine of Christ, 
and this harmony can only be secured when we make the 



I50 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

ultimate truth, the relation of each mind to God, funda- 
mental. This is the substance of that most compact and 
comprehensive assertion : *' I am the way and the truth 
and the life/' 

Men have been very slow to see and accept the fact 
that the form of the punishment in the divine government 
is expressed under various figures, and declares nothing { 
beyond the simple relation of sin and suffering. The 
tares are gathered and burned. The fishes are gathered, 
the good into vessels, and the bad are cast away. The 
rejected guests are cast into outer darkness, with wailing 
and gnashing of teeth. The wicked husbandmen are 
miserably destroyed. 

The words of our Lord are especially figurative. Spirit- 
ual ideas are boldly rendered by all the familiar images of 
life, and the fortunes of the Kingdom of Heaven advance 
under the form of a wavering conflict between the forces 
of good and evil — good angels and evil angels working 
their will in the world. When the seventy return with i 
joy, saying, '^ Lord, even the devils are subject unto us i 
through thy name," he makes answer, " I beheld Satan 
as lightning fall from Heaven.'' When the Pharisees 
found fault with him for healing on the Sabbath day the 
woman who had a spirit of infirmity, he indignantly asks : . 
" Ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham^ I 
whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be 
loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day ? " ^ When 
Peter undertook to rebuke Christ, as he announced his I 
coming crucifixion, he turned sharply upon his overbold t 
disciple with the words : " Get thee behind me, Satan. I 
Thou art an offence unto me." ^ Again, in anticipation 
of his unstable temper, he says to him : ^' Simon, Simon, ^ 

^ Luke xiii., i6. ^ Matt, xviii., 23. 



'I 



ii 



DOGMATISM. 151 

behold Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift 
you as wheat/' * The close interlock of all physical and 
spiritual relations in the mind of Christ is seen in his 
inquiry : '^ Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the 
palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Arise,- take 
up thy bed, and walk/''^ 

The vivid and figurative character of the Scriptures, 
springing from the double necessity of imparting clearly 
obscure ideas, and of enforcing them, compels the wise 
student to use the utmost caution in subjecting these 
words of insight to verbal de-ductions. When Christ says 
that^he speaks to the Jews in parables, because they see- 
ing see not, and hearing hear not, neither do understand, 
he is emphasizing this very fact that religious ideas 
become verbal and wholly obscure when they sink into a 
fixed terminology, and that they gain color again only by 
bringing them back to the events of life. Divine princi- 
ples play, like lights and shadows, among things, and 
must be there caught in their true significance before we 
can safely systematize them. 

Is it not, for example, ^ more rational to suppose that 
the doctrine of evil spirits is a figurative rendering of the 
conflicts of sin, rather than a literal statement of facts? 
That man is in any way subject to agents of evil, hidden 
from him, waylaying him, and far superior to him in 
craftiness, is a supposition wholly incongruous with a 
sound interpretation of daily life. The possession by 
evil spirits was a belief figuratively true and literally 
untrue. A profitable discussion of the real nature of 
these manifestations was not yet prepared for in the 
experience of the Jew, or in his methods of thought. 
The moral force of the events was more deeply felt 

1 Luke xxii., 31. ^ Mark ii., 9. 



152 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

under the popular notion than it would have been under 
a new idea inadequately imparted. Christ submitted his 
methods to the circumstances under which the truth 
was to be urged. A confining of attentiqn to primary 
principle was essential for their immediate apprehension, 
and for the apprehension of all secondary facts in due 
order. 

We are now prepared to see both the dangers of dogma 
and its office in Christian experience. Dogmatism claims 
a certainty of results and an absoluteness ^ of authority 
quite foreign to the circumstances of the case. In doing 
this it embarrasses the religious life, places the emphasis 
at the wrong point, and' fortifies it with a perverse temper. 
Truth is to minister to emotion, emotion is to inform con- 
duct, and conduct is to reinterpret truth. Life thus be- 
comes a circuit of living experiences. The arrest of this 
movement in its first step checks all growth. It is flexible 
truth which subserves the purposes of progress. Inflexible 
truth begins at once to lose power. The human mind is 
exceedingly limited in its attainments. This weakness 
is to be corrected by growth; but growth involves the 
freedom of change. This principle prevails everywhere 
in the world of living things. Dogmatism contravenes 
this law, and contravenes it precisely where it should 
have its fullest authority. The spirit of dogmatism, by 
anticipating growth, comes to stand directly in the way 
of it, and that in a region in which all things remain to 
be won. 

Doctrines, as the product of the reflective process, are 
especially unfit to be made the primary centres of union 
among men. Division, discrimination, careful emphasis, 
belong pre-eminently to the analytic and synthetic move- 
ment of mind. The very purpose of this systematizing 



DOGxMATISM. 1 53 

process is to give particulars their due weight ; and it 
often results in assigning them excessive weight. Not 
till we return to conduct and the sympathetic feelings 
-that it calls^out do we find the currents of human life run- 
ning together again and overcoming all erratic tendencies. 
It is the union of action which corrects the division of 
thought. Jf men are discriminating they cannot rally to 
a creed as they can to an undertaking. 

The creed also, as a fixed term in the life of a church, 
has helped to deaden its activity. A decay of piety dis- 
proportioned to the decay of doctrine is, in any long 
series of years, so universal a fact in every religious 
organization as to have the force of a law. This result is 
in part due to the separation occasioned between belief 
and conduct by a closed creed ; the failure of the former 
to control the latter, and the failure of the latter to correct 
the former. The living movement is arrested by dividing 
its terms. A reform in action always means one in belief 
also. It thus happens that, in periods of dormant faith, 
piety passes into pietism, an artificial quickening of feel- 
ing aside from the discipline of duties. The entire life 
thus becomes artificial because of the remote and visionary 
nature of its first terms in systematic faith. From this 
feverish activity there is a slow decline under the gravita- 
tion of sin. 

Sharp theological discussion not only begets hopeless 
division along slight lines of cleavage ; it occasions much 
bitterness of feeling, and springs up in the practical world 
as thorns and thistles. There is scarcely a sadder chapter 
in human history — one of mingled regret, disgust, and 
despair — than that of theological discussion. The light 
that is in these heavens serves only to make them the 
more lurid and portentous. We restore our faith by re- 



154 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

membering how tentative, obscure, and partial are all the 
stages of growth. 

Yet religious doctrine expresses an inevitable tendency 
of thought and subserves a most important and undenia- 
ble purpose. A current so strong and deep and constant 
as this implies a large territory back of it, which is its 
occasion. The object subserved by dogma is a complex 
one of life and of philosophy. All sound philosophy is a 
philosophy of life, and all large life issues in philosophy. 
A philosophy of some sort must be, as a conscious or a 
latent term, back of all rational action. Our only pro- 
tection against that which is weaker is that which is 
stronger ; against superstition is faith, against negation is 
affirmation, against sinking into ignorance is rising into 
knowledge. We must do the best we can, as our only 
safety against doing worse than we might. 

The human mind, by its upward bent, pushes into the 
light, and the highest light into which it can grow is this 
very light of a philosophy of life, a theory of the Divine 
Presence, a programme of the eternal procedure in the 
moral world. To underrate the value of this work is in- 
sensate, so insensate that no matter how wise those may 
be who fall into this error, how great the scorn they be- 
stow on this inquiry, men are sure to return to it, and the 
chances are that these agnostics themselves will, in one 
way or another, at one time or another, occupy them- 
selves with it. They do not escape the fascination of 
these profound questions by denying their fitness. If 
metaphysics is a wallow in the spiritual world, it is one to 
which men, no matter how often washed by science, are 
ever returning. 

We have no patience with the spurious knowledge — 
spurious in this one particular — which decries the highest, 



DOGMATISM. 1 55 

most ultimate, most inevitable form of inquiry. Systema- 
tic theology, while it has no premises which entitle it to 
final conclusions, has abundantly the material of search, 
and deepens thought and enriches feelings beyond other 
forms of investigation. It has an irresistible fascination 
for the vigorous intellect, and draws men into its vortex 
in the very act of turning from it. When men fully 
apprehend that life involves a philosophy of life, and 
that the largest, most self-conscious life involves the pres- 
ence of this philosophy in the mind as a distinct term of 
thought, they will understand the office of systematic 
theology — a careful inquiry into the ultimate relations of 
conduct. 

No investigation is more important, because none covers 
more comprehensively all the terms of experience, none 
is more practical, because, while modified by all the con- 
ditions of life, it brings, in turn, constant modification to 
them. 

This, indeed, is what we have been urging, that in- 
duction should unite itself to deduction in theology, that 
principles should interpret themselves by the facts that 
come under them, that the events of life should contain 
and confirm our revelation of God, and that we should 
see that from the beginning his method of instruction 
has been empirical and historical. We are quite right in 
deducing great truths from that exceptionally clear and 
significant record of facts — the Bible ; we mistake only 
when we suppose it to be different in its truths from 
other sources of truth, and diverse in its record from the 
record we ourselves are making under the same over- 
shadowing providence. The second coming of Christ, his 
daily access to us, is not less significant than his first 
coming. 



156 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

Natural theology underlies revealed theology. How- 
ever numerous and explicit the principles we trace to 
the Scriptures, they all rest back on, and help to bring 
to light, the* truths incorporated in the constitution of 
things. Whatever may be the source of light, that which 
it illuminates and enlivens is the universe about us. Light 
and the things revealed lie in the closest interaction — 
neither is intelligible without the other. 



CHAPTER IV. 



PIETISM. 



The religious life, as a higher life, a life under a wider 
range of motives, and motives less immediate and tangible 
than those of the appetites and passions, seems vague and 
remote to most men. They find difficulty in laying hold 
of it, and turning it into palpable convictions and suit- 
able actions. There has been, in consequence of this 
uncertain touch in spiritual things, a constant effort to 
give outline and definition to religious life by prescribed 
duties, explicit professions, and strong conventional feel- 
ings. This tendency to narrow, and at the same time to 
intensify, religious experience, is what we understand by 
pietism. It is piety expressed vigorously, but in a cir- 
cumscribed form, that is deemed distinctively religious. 
The pietist is a man of ardent devotion to distinctively 
religious duties, with an intense form of character colored 
by supersensuous convictions, and with a burning desire 
to inspire his own sentiments in others. In pietism the 
religious life is gathered, like sunlight passing through 
a lens, into a heated centre, rather than diffused, like 
sunlight in the atmosphere, over the entire field of action. 
Pietism is a familiar fact in all forms of faith. It arises 
inevitably from the narrowness of human thought in con- 
nection with a desire more completely to express one's 
obedience to truth. It has belonged, in a great variety 

157 



158 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

of forms, to the Christian Church ahuost from the be- 
ginning. 

The first extended and striking manifestation of it was 
asceticism. The ascetic gave shape to his Christian expe- 
rience in arbitrary self-denial, and with sufferings which 
were not associated with the performance of any duty. 
No specific good came either to himself or to others by 
his self-imposed inflictions ; except as they were regarded 
as the expression of religious feeling. Religious devo- 
tion, turning aside from simple and direct labor in doing 
good, devised for itself a severe method of discipline, 
with no basis in nature and no merit of service to man- 
kind. Asceticism was an irrational and melancholy per- 
version of Christian self-denial, and yet was not wholly 
without value, simply because it sprang from the higher 
incentives and reacted on them. It was life, though a 
deformed and diseased one. Asceticism, in its squalor, 
solitude, and self-devised sufferings, was not merely a 
failure to apprehend and perform social duties, a substi- 
tution of meaningless inflictions for the labors of a divine 
beneficence, it was a trespass, and often a grievous 
trespass, on the physical, the intellectual, and the spirit- 
ual powers. The mind was filled with visions, neither 
pure nor peaceful, neither wholesome nor corrective. 
The religious life suffered profound misapprehension 
and profound perversion. This distortion belonged to 
asceticism not merely in its extreme forms, but in its 
entire spirit ; to all self-denial accepted for any other 
object than real service. It misconceived the will of 
God and our duty to him, and put in place of actions 
spiritually beautiful, deformed and frightful ones. It is 
a diabolical spectacle to see men inflict pain on each 
other as a religious duty ; it is a spectacle of infatuation 



i 



PIETISM. 159 

and folly hardly less depressing to see them inflict suffer- 
ings on themselves as a divine discipline. 

Yet so strongly is this tendency associated with devo- 
tion, that it is constantly reappearing, and assuming some 
new phase. Many, especially in the Catholic Church, 
express a temper of self-denial in needless sufferings ; as 
if the thing called for were not a rational surrender of 
immediate pleasure in behalf of an adequate end, but 
simply the surrender itself. The sin against reason in 
asceticism is complete. Wise suffering is endured for the 
sake of limiting evil and removing pain ; ascetic inflic- 
tions are undergone as a voluntary enlargement of pain. 
Not only does evil carry with it pain, pain carries with it 
evil, in wasting productive power and impoverishing the 
spiritual affections. Although the contention against 
pain in the world is subordinate to that against evil, the 
tw^o forms of strife must go on together, and share the 
same fortunes. To introduce needless pain is to give sin 
needless provocation. 

The hold which this form of pietism retains on the 
ardent, spiritual mind was recently illustrated in the narra- 
tive of Clare Vaughan, Her devotion is spoken of as 
one which gives us ^^ a standard by w^hich to measure the 
Christian life and the high aspiration of Catholic faith." 
** Even her childhood was marked by an enthusiastic love 
of Christ — such a love that her companions discovered 
with pain that it was really filling her mind, almost to the 
eclipse of her devotion to them, — and also by a passion 
for self-inflicted sufferings endured to prove this deep 
love which seems to those who are not Roman Catholics 
a strange form of devotion, and one that contrasts very 
remarkably with the brightness and sweetness of Clare 
Vaughan's disposition." '' Her love of mortification was 



l6o THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

such that nothing she saw or came across failed to sug- 
gest some means of torturing or annoying her unfortunate 
body. How well I remember one day when we were 
returning from a village in the neighborhood. We hap- 
pened to be passing through a stubble-field, and breaking 
off suddenly from what she had been talking about, she 
cried, ' I have a splendid idea ! Suppose we take off our 
shoes and stockings and walk barefoot through the 
stubble-field ! ' It was no sooner said than done, and I 
can see now the calm enjoyment with which Clare walked 
up and down those cruel many-bristling thorns, followed 
by the sympathetic shrieks of her cowardly companion, 
who very soon resumed shoes and stockings." ^ 

How came asceticism to arise as a pietistic tendency in 
the Christian Church ? and what has been its effects, good 
and evil, on our apprehension of the spirit of Christ ? 
Asceticism gave at once that definite, tangible expression 
to the religious life which men desired. It satisfied the 
wish of the devout to do something as an instant and 
adequate outcome of feeling, and to separate themselves 
by bold lines of division from the irreligious. The noto- 
riety which attended on extreme asceticism carried with 
it a mingled flavor of good and evil. The devotee, by 
extravagant self-denial, might gratify the very pervasive 
and subtile feeling of vanity, and might also, to his own 
apprehension, extend religious truth. 

The conditions under which Christian life was devel- 
oped in earlier centuries were such as to favor asceti- 
cism. It was not easy to impose religious truth in 
wholesome forms on the minds of men. The obstruc- 
tions to conceiving and expressing the right temper were 
very great. It was natural, therefore, to feel, that as one 
could not save the world, he must save himself by a sepa- 

^ The Spectator, October 29, 1887. 



PIETISM. l6l 

ration from it. In this isolation, the discipHne of useful 
labors being lost, its place was supplied by artificial exac- 
tions, and these were increased with the increase of the 
spirit of self-denial. The movement, having missed the 
guidance of facts, found no limits within itself. The 
desire of redeeming one's soul took the place of the 
desire of redeeming the world. Thus the relation of 
these two ideas, the salvation and the renovation of the 
spirit, was hopelessly confused. The saving the soul 
came to mean the rescuing of the man from the future 
consequences of sin rather than immediate purification. 
The future was to be won more or less at the cost of the 
present, not by and with it. Asceticism favored this 
confusion of thought, and grew up with it. The maimed 
character of the* life the devotee was at the time leading 
was not the point of attention, but the effects of his 
action on a future life. The moment we make this dis- 
tinction, darkness and error enter rapidly. The con- 
tinuity of life is lost. Our exertions are turned into a 
Tcind of spiritual gymnastics of whose value we have no 
immediate test. They are undertaken for obscure^ re- 
mote objects, and must find their justification in them. 
Everything hinges upon our theory of salvation, and as 
long as this holds good in the mind, we may wisely in- 
crease our spurious acts of self-sacrifice. The man who is 
striving to help men in the world, who is trying to improve 
the world as the abode of men, has the present fruits of 
his efforts to enlarge and correct his judgments; but he 
who is struggling to save souls, in this narrow sense, 
decides on the success of his measures under the same 
artificial ideas that have led him to enter on them. He 
meets, therefore, with nothing to expose his failures, for 
his thought and method are fanciful throughout. 

A very intelligent workman, whose proclivities were 



l62 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

skeptical, once said to me, that if Christians would cease 
their efforts to save the souls of men and try to save their 
bodies, they would do much better. In this assertion w^e 
have the complimentary error of the mistake of asceticism, 
the expectation of securing physical progress in separation 
from spiritual improvement. The two are so interwoven 
in the divine method, that neither can be pursued success- 
fully, for any length of time, aside from the other. Stal- 
wart righteousness means stalwart strength, and demands, 
in its proper expression, large physical and intellectual 
appliances. The beauty of the world loses its most fitting 
ministrations without righteousness, and righteousness 
misses its ineffable perfection, if it has no mastery of the 
means by which it is to declare itself. The Kingdom of 
Heaven is embodied righteousness, righteousness that 
builds up society, enriches and beautifies it. The ascetic, 
aiming to save his own soul by self-imposed discipline, in 
separation from the world about him, fails to understand 
rightly in what salvation consists. The soul can only be 
saved in connection with men, as its salvation lies in deep- 
ened, widened, quickened affections. Love must have be- 
fore it the field of love, or it can gain no new power. We 
might as well expect bodily strength without bodily action, 
as spiritual strength without contact with spiritual inter- 
ests. A man saves himself in saving others. Inflictions 
that subserve no purposes of reconstruction among men 
arise from a perversion of thought and still further extend 
it. Paul says : ^* I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and 
fill up that which was wanting in the sufferings of Christ.*' 
But these were sufferings in behalf of others, and made 
necessary by the exigencies of the case. God's school is 
one of suffering, but not one of wasted suffering. Its aim 
is to overcome suffering in behalf of ourselves and others. 



PIETISM. 163 

The discipline of suffering lies chiefly in the earnestness 
and wisdom of the effort to eliminate it. Love animates 
this effort, and all the affections gather in its path. What 
more manifest spiritual sophism than a gratuitous inflic- 
tion of suffering on ourselves, when it is, with us, a con- 
stant duty to relieve the sufferings of others? While it 
is not the very substance of righteousness to escape pain, 
it is its manifest glory that it does escape it. We should 
have hardly fallen so readily into this error of self-mortifi- 
cation, if we had not become accustomed to look on the 
sufferings of Christ as arbitrary. 

Yet asceticism has played an important part in the spir- 
itual improvement of the world. It offers another illus- 
tration of the familiar fact, that the road to truth is always 
one of error. A temper of abnegation may be present 
in pietism, and help to give the spirit that mastery over 
itself which is an essential in righteousness. Asceticism, 
when it is associated with beneficence, makes a very strong 
appeal to the imagination of men. Even that which is 
preposterous in it adds to the impression. The purely 
voluntary character of the suffering becomes its merit, and 
enhances its force as a mastery of spiritual ideas. The 
simplicity of truth is often less efficacious with men than 
some striking exhibit made under an error allied to the 
truth. 

In asceticism, the spirit does itself a violence in break- 
ing away from dominant, sensuous ideas. It treats its 
own most needful members as if they were enemies, and 
maims itself in seeking liberty, as the wild animal may 
pluck itself from the trap with the loss of a limb. Nobility 
of purpose is here united with folly of method, and often, 
in the balance of effects, carries the day. The living plant 
triumphs over a bleak climate. 



164 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

Yet the error of method is here to bear with it its 
disastrous entail. The thoughts are narrowed, the affec- 
tions impoverished, and labor made unfruitful by a 
procedure transverse to the grace of God, not parallel 
with it. If one does not rise above asceticism, by asceti- 
cism religion is slowly converted into fanaticism, ever 
more barren, deformed, and hateful. We must expect 
error, but we must also look for the power to shake it 
off. The prayer and fasting of the New Testament may 
easily be made to grow into asceticism. They need, in 
use, the interpretation of reason under adequate ends. 
They are good so far as they purify and strengthen the 
mind without diverting it from its true labors or weaken- 
ing it in them. The simple fact which remains at the 
centre of the divine method, that body and mind can 
only work successfully in the closest union, is a law to 
grace as much as it is to labor. 

Pietism arises very frequently in reaction against a self- 
indulgent phase of religious life. The asceticism of St. 
Francis and the poverty which he enjoined on his follow- 
ers were distinguishing traits in a corrupt period. The 
Franciscans thus drew attention and addressed the popu- 
lar conscience in a new and direct ^ay. The spirit of their 
work was expressed and aided by this voluntary self-denial. 
It is often easier, and for the moment more effective, to 
transcend the line of wise and proportionate action than 
it is to reach and maintain it. 

But the Franciscans did not escape the taint of thought 
and feeling attendant on this enforced poverty. The bit- 
ter hostility between the spirituals, who adhered to the 
doctrine in its extreme form, and the conventuals, who 
softened it to suit changing conditions, and the cruel 
persecution of the former, were some of the fruits of this 



PIETISM. 165 

early excess in the life and spirit of St. Francis. The acts 
and garments which marked the ascetic temper became 
with many of his disciples things of fundamental impor- 
tance. Every irrational action helps to destroy the 
balance of thought, and to turn the indomitable energy 
of a devout mind into self-assertion. The stronger the 
impulse with w^hich we are dealing, the greater our need 
of sober judgment. 

A second form of pietism is ritualism, when pushed 
beyond its simple disciplinary service. The need of a rite 
arises from ignorance and weakness. It puts upon the 
mind a method of worship, because the mind cannot 
advantageously supply its own method. Or a system of 
rites unites men in worship, and prevents a wasteful 
collision of forms. Where the spirit of God is,, there is 
liberty, because there is the capacity to use liberty. Rites 
will be gross and cumbersome in the degree in which 
those who employ them are barren in spiritual life. The 
complicated temple worship, the innumerable bloody 
sacrifices of the Jewish service, were very coarse expres- 
sions of our relations to God. The sensuous element in 
them was large, and easily overpowered their spiritual 
import. They were adapted to a people gross of heart 
and stiff of neck. The first terms in the spiritual training 
of an unspiritual people must necessarily be remote from 
the inner life of faith. Ritualism arises in accommodation 
to a sensuous temper. It gives an artificial approach to 
God, when the soul is failing of ready access to him. This 
relation of rites to religion implies a disparagement of them, 
and yet it involves their immense value in the history of 
the world. One can hardly use a liturgy, permeated with 
spiritual insight, without becoming enamored of it. It 
so touches in purity the best thoughts of men, so enriches 



l66 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

itself by association, so gathers into a swift, songful stream 
of utterance the feelings of all who unite in it, that one 
seems to have found, having wandered in paths remote, 
the highway to Heaven. 

But the pietistic spirit, the spirit of concentration and 
excess, easily lays hold of ritualism, as especially suited 
to its purposes. The ritual is made minute and vigorous. 
The religious life is sharply distinguished by means of it,| 
and duty rapidly becomes the faithful use of means, not 
the wise winning of ends. A ritual is a ready way of 
giving outward form to religious action, and consoling the 
mind with results that are immediate and visible. For 
the ultimate up-shot of the method, it can fall back on the 
spirit of mysticism, on the inscrutable and the divine. If 
we are to judge the world by God's declaration of it in 
science, it is, in construction, profoundly opposed to 
mysticism ; if we are to judge of it by man's exposition 
of it in religion, it lapses readily, in many ways and 
places, into obscure and fanciful connections. Man is 
always practically struggling with the question, how to 
satisfy the sensuous tendencies and the spiritual tenden- 
cies of the mind without a decisive victory of either, 
without the incorporation of both in a higher life. A 
ritual is a short answer to this inquiry. When this answer 
has been made, any extra pressure of the higher senti- 
ments shows itself in pietism, in restored, enlarged, and 
enforced rites that will retain more or less of their disci- 
plinary character, according to the disposition of the 
person who makes use of them. If the rite does not 
steadily raise us above the rite, our observance of it will 
become an increasing obstruction to vision, casting a 
deeper and deeper shadow on the real duties of life. 

The form of pietism most immediately interesting to us 
is that which is more frequently associated Avith Protestant 



4 



PIETISM. 167 

forms of faith — the pietism of intensified, religious senti- 
ment. We need say nothing of the pietism of rigorous 
doctrine, for that has been sufficiently considered as 
dogmatism. Religious feeling often leads the mind to 
enforce a creed, aside from any intellectual apprehension 
of it. The movement of the mind is not pure and color- 
less; but turbid with mistaken feeling. The sentiments 
add themselves as so much weight to the thoughts, and 
thus enhance their momentum in a disastrous way. It is 
this emotional element, uncontrolled of reason, that con- 
verts belief into dogmatism, and disturbs the composure 
of the spirit. 

But there is a pietism of intensified feeling disconnected 
from the creed. The emotions are laboriously called out 
and carefully cherished as containing the distinguishing 
terms of a religious experience w^ithout relation to their 
immediate connection with well-directed effort. The 
feelings are thus sought after and fed out of connection 
with their vital dependencies and purposes. Our con- 
victions of sin, our sense of the nearness of God, or of the 
duty of prayer, or of the value of a religious experience, 
are kept alive by constantly returning to them, and by an 
assiduous effort to make them, in an intense form, habitual. 
They thus become direct products of will, instead of the 
indirect fruits of conduct. The religious life is identified 
with these feelings, and their maintenance is made a lead- 
ing purpose. The saints of Protestant churches are quite 
hkely to have a decisive tinge of this form of pietism. 
Saintship is associated with the religious sentiments. 
Devotion, consecration, separation from the world, are 
its designations, and may cover an exalted yet an arti- 
ficial state of mind. These experiences miss the true 
breadth of life, the real power of the spirit. They bear a 
narrow remedial character, rather than one of wide reno- 



1 68 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

vation and growth. If our bodily members are sinking" 
into torpor, if the circulation is partially checked, we may 
restore this, certainly, by friction. But the results so se- 
cured are quite distinct from the vigor of the entire body^ 
and are by no means to be substituted for it. Religious 
feelings that are not the spontaneous out-flow of a noble 
and useful life, feelings that are cherished as in them- 
selves an experience, that special experience we term 
spiritual, may also be the products of an intellectual 
friction, and lead us to carry this movement cure into all 
departments of faith. Our Christian churches are very 
much influenced in their efforts by pietism, and religion 
is not so much a large and wise government of life as 
certain obscure experiences superinduced upon it. 

A rare form of pietism, which one is least disposed to 
criticise, but does well to understand, is the entire and 
direct devotion of one's property to religious work. It 
has offered itself in religious orders as the vow of poverty. 
This form of pietism, while lacking that completeness and 
breadth of motives which belong to true spirituality, may 
very well show great moral power. A manifest ^vid 
absolute subordination of lower to higher motives gives 
to the latter a sense of reality which the popular mind is 
sure to appreciate. This consecration puts that in the 
foreground which is in the foreground, and errs only in 
not sufficiently supporting it with all the beauty and 
large invitation that lie in the rear of true holiness. 

The motives of life are very various and very complex, 
and should render each other, in the development of 
virtue, constant and extended support. The best im- 
pulses take on harsh and barren phases unless they are 
finding their way among the manifold forms of a complete 
life. The social and the spiritual incentives which gather 



PIETISM. 169 

about the acquisition and expenditure of property bring 
t^ery extended, forceful, and needful motives to action. 
They are wrought thoroughly into the constitution of the 
world, of man and of society. Progress certainly needs 
their aid, and will be found closely associated with them. 
While it is a noble thing to push right through minor 
interests and enter heartily into larger ones that lie 
beyond, it is a more proportionate method and, in the 
progress of years, effective one, to gather up in a purified 
form all accessory incentives, and to ttnite, on the broad 
basis of the actual world, those forces which must ulti- 
mately enter into society, support, and nourish it. That 
mastery of wealth which retains its varied uses, which 
enables its possessor, with no separation between himself 
and other men, no loss of sympathy with them, to work 
effectively on every plane of effort with every worthy 
impulse, higher and lower, to prosper the present labors 
as well as the future hopes of life, to gather to the spiritual 
front the pleasure and beauties of existence in their divine 
order, to reflect with happy forecast the multiplied 
enjoyments we bestow so lavishly on our conception of 
Heaven — that mastery is certainly far better than an 
abnegation which puts away effort and temptation because 
they are too hard for us. 

In the long work of redemption and construction all 
the resources of the world must come into play, and we 
do well to learn how to hold them together in the very 
outset ; how to build them together in a social structure 
well supported within and without by all modes of 
dependence and bonds of union. This extreirie consecra- 
tion, bearing the narrow cast of pietism, in its effort to 
win the higher in oversight of that which is lower, finds 
really no encouragement in the example of the Master. 



I/O THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

The young man who came to our Lord with the inquiry, 
*^ What shall I do to be saved? '' was met with the com- 
mand, ^* Sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor '' ; 
because only thus could a thickly woven veil of spiritual 
sophistries be rent through, and the light be admitted to 
his bewildered mind. As an example, it stands quite by 
itself, and testifies to its exceptional character. A giving 
that overlooks in the giver the appropriate conditions of 
economic and social progress, must always suffer abate- 
ment in its force of example. Men instantly feel that the 
^ method is not a universal one. They, therefore, are con- 
tent to regard it as more exceptional than it really is. 
An attitude toward the use of property, which appreciates 
all its ministrations, — outward, inward, and upward — is 
that more rare and noble thing — the divine mind, in its 
plentitude of methods and breadth of motives. To know 
how to possess the world is to know how to possess 
Heaven, — is to convert it into Heaven. 

Pietism is closely associated with two points of belief 
that narrow our relations to the world. The first of these 
is that conversion involves a sudden, decisive change of 
character, and may be present more or less aside from 
the slow gains of obedience. Daily experience is misin- 
terpreted in the establishment of this theory of an imme- 
diate transformation, and sentiments — the conventional 
sentiments of pietism — are accepted as the sound and 
sufficient currency of a new life. In the degree in which 
the changes of character are taken out from under the 
ordinary laws of mind, and consequences are looked for 
which have no sufficient antecedents in conduct, shall we 
find ourselves afloat in thought, and ready to receive 
mystic expressions of feeling as signs of the divine favor. 
The seed sown on light soil, and sown among thorns, 



PIETISM. 171 

perishing by the heat or choked by the weeds, becomes a 
type of that pietism which arises from the ready admis- 
sion of supernaturahsm into the sources of conduct. If 
the elements of character may enter suddenly^ and out of 
relation to the bulk of action, then may we possibly be 
able to induce fortunate sentiments by some special point 
of view painfully maintained. If, however, we are put in 
connection with the entire world, with its innumerable 
wants, for the very end of giving us terms of discipline ; 
if the breadth of sound conduct bears some proportion to 
the breadth of these its enclosing relations ; if the solidity 
of character is incident to firm repose on these same sup- 
porting facts ; if favorable changes of character must arise 
by temperate and wise action under them ; and if the 
only sufficient proof of meeting the divine will is the 
enlargement of the divine love among men, then this 
pietism which gives an in-door culture to a few selected 
and artificial sentiments is a mistake, and stands in very 
partial harmony with the broad and patient thought of 
God. We must understand by conversion, before we can 
pursue it aright, a steady turning toward a larger and 
more gracious life, a slow putting forth, under more 
comprehensive feelings, of bud, leaf, flower, and fruit 
in a Kingdom of Heaven, beautiful with an amplitude all 
its own. 

The second impression which leads to pietism is one 
entertained much in the face of the words of Christ, the 
feeling that salvation has chief reference to another life. 
We allow the larger interests of that life to stand over 
against the immediate interests of this life, and so put 
the two in conflict in their action on us. These interests, 
on either hand, are part and parcel of the same thing. 
The salvation of another life is in continuation of the 



1/2 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

salvation of this life, and is reached through it. It is not 
sufficient to look upon conduct and character as means 
to an end, salvation ; they are the very substance of 
salvation. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. We 
are in the midst of God's redemptive grace, and have 
no occasion to forecast a future in which that grace 
shall declare itself. The Kingdom we labor for, and of 
which by our labors we are made partakers, is a Kingdom 
that overlaps the world. Thy will be done in earth as it 
is in Heaven. When we strengthen ourselves against the 
failures of well-doing by the assurance of ultimate suc- 
cess, we do wisely ; but when we console ourselves with 
feeble things, flattered by a promise of better ones 
beyond the limits of our own action, we are simply 
nursing our indolence. Spiritual life comes under the 
conditions of all life, and we maintain our hold on the 
future by our hold on the present. 

Pietism overlooks, or underestimates, this living con- 
tinuity, this organic character of truth, and nourishes 
expectations in contradiction of the terms of their fulfil- 
ment. It is thus negligent in securing these terms. Our 
belief in the blessings of the future is superinduced on 
the ills of the present, not to make us diligent in correct- 
ing them, but to render us patient in tolerating them — a 
patience that approaches contentment, when these ills are 
spiritual, not physical, ones. Pietism often intensifies, 
feelings which divert us from the very process of their 
realization. We misconceive the evils under which we 
are laboring, and misconceive their remedy. We fall into 
the very pervasive fallacy that the modification of things 
is more significant than that of persons ; that the patient^ 
spiritualizing discipline to which we are subjected is in a 
measure superfluous. Life is present in the degree in 



M 



PIETISM. 173 

which love is present, and in that degree only. The 
world is the school of love. Miss the lesson, and we miss 
the Heaven which lies in learning it. 

We propose, as a theme of social worship, '^ God's un- 
speakable gift, do we possess it ? '' In considering it, the 
mind is confused between the winnings of the present life 
and the rewards of a future life, between naturalism and 
supernaturalism. With a pietistic temper we throw the 
balance of hope on the least tangible term. We are to 
have what we now have not. It is as if we should strive 
to rest, not on the foot already planted, but on that 
which is raised for forward movement. Our poise in the 
spiritual world is in the present ; from this support we must 
make our cast into the future. God's unspeakable gift is 
the power and opportunity of immediate growth. 

Pietism is sure to accompany a supernaturalism in any 
way separated from naturalism. It is a belief, in one or 
more particulars, in such a separation : a waiting to realize 
results that transcend the connections of experience. It 
is a kind of ecstasy made to take the place of sober 
thought, and though it may not be altogether ill-placed or 
ineffectual, it cannot, with strength and safety, attain to 
the sufficient and peaceful fruits of righteousness. Pietism 
contains the fallacy of a search after effects without 
sufficient causes — after sentiments not fully sustained by 
the circumstances which give occasion to them. It is not 
ia harmony with those many stages of growth, those 
untiring processes of consolidation, those innumerable 
steps of diffusion, under labor, by which God leads us 
into a kingdom, comprehensive of all, and of all the inter- 
ests of each. Pietism, the feverish activity of spiritual 
life at a few points, and its strange torpor at many points, 
is the outcome of a mode of thought that overlooks, 



174 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

somewhat, the fixed dependence of events on each other^ 
and expects, at some stage of progress, to rise suddenly, 
like a bird in the air, and leave great spaces behind it. 
Pietism is the intoxication of piety, and, like intoxication, 
sobers down into weakness and fear. 

This temper exists in every measure, from the slight 
extravagance of healthy activity to the abnormal concep- 
tions of extreme asceticism. While pietism finds its 
occasion in our misapprehension of the processes of grace, 
in our unwise understanding of the relations of the present 
to the future and of God^s gifts to our own activity, it 
finds its incentives in desires which belong to us as mere 
children, wayward and ignorant in spiritual things. A 
disposition to compromise is the inevitable outcome of 
strong, conflicting feelings. What takes place in a body 
of men with divided interests takes place in each man 
with divided sentiments. No far-reaching reform has 
come to any people without passing through many phases 
of pitiful compromise, and being pushed by means bf jj 
them to a final issue. Such an evil as intemperance is 
plucked up, like a noxious, spreading plant, root by root, 
patch by patch. Religion demands that a new centre 
should be taken, and all thought and action be rearranged 
from it. Man neither fully sees this demand, nor readily \ 
assents to it. The alterations of character are slow and 
partial. Attention is concentrated on single forms of 
experience, and so we have pietism. Pietism is a com- 
promise between sin and holiness by which something is 
conceded and something saved, by which the religious life 
is held bacK from the entire field of conduct, but, in 
compensation, is allowed to rule here and there with 
peculiar rigor. Men, in dealing with spiritual motives, 
are encountering ideas more or less alien to their experi- 



1 



PIETISM. 175 

ence, and so they give them partial, distorted, and extreme 
expression. The spiritual life is a struggle, and thus for 
a long time a compromise, between conflictiong ten- 
dencies. 

A second occasion of pietism is the desire of men to 
reach quickly tangible results. Pure spiritualism is too 
remote, too broad, too supersensible for their successful 
pursuit. A narrower difference, a more immediate dis- 
tinction, even if it be a superficial one, pleases them 
better. Pietism meets this feeling. The ascetic, what- 
ever else he is or is not, is separate from the world. The 
ritualist is at once distinguishable in his ways and his 
worship. The pietist of sentiment is divisible immedi- 
ately from his fellows by his strong and pungent phrase- 
ology. These distinctions enhance the impression that 
the children of God are, as indeed they ought to be, a 
peculiar people. The delight, on the one side, in a visible 
result, and the blindness, on the other, which obscures 
the real qualities of the Kingdom of Heaven, give occa- 
sion to pietism, as a short-hand method of recording 
tendencies that men have not yet the grace to write at 
large. We discern superficial differences far more quickly 
than profound ones, and stumble on for a long time 
among the lengthened shadow of things still remote from 
us. We have not reached the foot of the mount of vision, 
much less climbed its slope. 

The evils of pietism are partial, open to correction, and 
inseparably associated with many gains. Pietism is an 
inadequate, transitional form of life, and may give way to 
one more pervasive. It delays us in understanding the 
religious spirit. A growing comprehension of that spirit, 
not as one which seeks peculiar terms in experience, but 
as one which handles familiar terms with more insight. 



1/6 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

will drive back pietism, point by point, and will substitute 
for the feverish action of one set of faculties the measured 
action of all the faculties. It is for the sake of the reli- 
gious life, its right apprehension, its true extension, that 
we censure pietism as an insufficient expression of the 
divine mind. 

Pietism is almost inevitable among the ignorant, and 
yet they especially suffer from it. One approaches an 
average man in whom the upward tendency of thought 
has been repressed by the urgent wants, coarse desires, and 
superficial conventionalisms of a narrow experience. He 
is of the earth earthy. His affections are of the natural, 
and not of the spiritual, order. The forces which con- 
struct society are not thought of ; no personal or social 
ideal is present to the imagination. He walks by the 
sight of the eyes, almost as much so as an animal, only 
with a wider range of objects. One wishes to awaken 
religious ideas in such a person, or impart to him a 
decisive religious impulse. He finds himself at great dis- 
advantage in attempting it. No common ground, common 
vocabulary, common experience, lie between them. His 
words sink into weak moral truisms, and carry no weight. 
It is hardly possible to reach such a man without some 
degree or form of pietism. Some impressions must be 
thrown out of proportion in order that they may gain the 
appearance of strength. Emphasis must be excessive, 
that the truth may offer itself as at all emphatic. Such a 
man identifies religion with religious professions, religious 
actions, religious distinctions ; marks with which he is 
familiar, and without which he misses the lessons they 
contain. 

Yet such a person suffers very much from pietism. He 
does not comprehend the religious force of what you say 



riETiSM. 177 

till you use the right phrase, and when the conventional 
expression is employed, he readily lapses into a narrow, 
sanctimonious form of thought which has in it very little 
renovating power. He can recognize religion only in one 
way, and so when the recognition comes it is of very 
restricted value. If we believe that what God requires is 
the blood of bulls and goats, that the pietistic sentiment 
is the substance of piety, then the grace, naturalness, and 
largeness of salvation will remain hidden from us. 

Religion needs to renew its speech constantly ; it calls 
for more direct forms of thought, for less conventional and 
more spiritual modes of expression. A first office of the 
religious life is to give light, light to words, light to 
actions, light to all the straight and winding paths that 
lead upward, light that discloses the living gifts and mani- 
fold beauties of the ways of God. Pietism fails in its own 
revelation and fails as a revelation. It is a disguise and a 
restriction, in one degree or another, of the grace of God. 
Those who are spiritually minded are predestined of God 
to beget a pure, bracing spiritual atmosphere, which 
re-endows, with its vitalizing energies, all the higher 
powers of men. The close air and mal-odors of an unven- 
tilated room are not more hostile to robust health, than 
are the set phrases and meagre experiences of pietism to 
spiritual strength, and full fraternity in the Kingdom 
of Heaven. The deep evil of pietism is that it misappre- 
hends the religious life which it seeks to propagate. The 
divine love struggles first with disobedience, and then 
with the narrow forms of obedience that replace it. 

As itself a restriction of life, pietism modifies all our 
methods of presenting life in the household and the 
Church. It is hardly necessary to say, that an effort to 
correct a method does not necessarily involve an oversight 



1 78 THE NEW THEOLOGY, 

of the gains that have accompanied it, or of its unavoid- 
able character .as a transitional phase in development. 
Life is always busy in taking down that which it itself has 
built up. Any particular form of pietism arises from the 
defective conceptions of truth on the part of those who 
teach and of those who are taught. It is an obscure, 
spiritual product which can only be changed slowly as the 
result of increasiiig insight. A sweeping condemnation of 
the modes of instruction, at any one time prevalent, arises 
from a superficial apprehension of the force of the facts 
with which they are associated, and a presumptuous hope 
of an easy correction of fact and theory together. Our 
choice, in the world's progress, lies more in the rapidity of 
changes, than it does in the steps of change. Wise criti- 
cism is chiefly interested in the immediate possibilities of 
improvement, and emphasizes the partial failures of the 
past simply as giving the occasion of growth. 

The instruction of the pulpit, when we consider how 
extended, constant, and earnest it is, is less efficacious than 
we might hope it to be. It is narrowed in its influence 
by the dogmatic, and, still more, by the pietistic, spirit. 
The pulpit aims at results, and produces results, far more 
limited than the wants of men. It does not address itself 
directly and broadly to these wants. Pietism is accepted 
as the germ of piety, and is enforced unhesitatingly as the 
substance of a religious life. But pietism is not piety in 
its expansive corrective phase, but in its phase of contrac- 
tion. It is not putting truth to new uses, but holding it 
fast under a form of expression which is ready to be 
superseded. It is not the life that is advancing, but the 
life that will not give way. 

When the dogmatic mind is met with the failure of 
truth to reach the masses of men, with the defection of 



PIETISM. 179 

the popular mind from religious ideas, it falls back at once 
on pietism. The old truths must be preached with more 
boldness and more conviction. Cold limbs must be 
warmed, and stiff limbs made limber, by friction. It fails 
to understand that this weakening of conviction is the 
inevitable outcome of truths which are not allowed to 
grow into and with the social activity that encloses them ; 
that this lack of force is the very evil complained of, and 
cannot be corrected by lung power. 

Pietism asserts that simple piety is to be sought after, 
and that it will bring with it, in due order, all moral 
virtues. And this assertion it makes in face of the fact 
that this very piety is pursued in separation from social, 
reformatory effort. The dogmatic temper fails to inter- 
pret piety in terms of human well-being, and yet affirms 
that piety will be so rendered in due order by those who 
possess it. Pietism lays more stress on the propagation, 
from person to person, of a given sentiment, than on the 
purification of that sentiment, till it becomes a medium of 
the divine mind ; on conversion, than on the larger, more 
transcendent life for which it stands. It lays utmost 
emphasis on the beginnings of things, but is much less 
anxious that these first things should ripen into the ful- 
ness of the divine thought. 

Pietism can exist, and frequently does exist, side by 
side with heinous forms of sin, without coming into dis- 
tinct conflict with them ; simply because it is substituting 
a narrow and more or less artificial experience for one of 
divinely ordered growth. It arrests truth, and allows the 
transgressions of men to arrest it, in its corrective power. 
It has not a sufficiently instant and urgent conception 
of the fulness of the Kingdom of Heaven to see the 
obstacles that lie in its path. It cannot open the con- 



l8o THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

flict with evil at all points, because it has not drawn out 
its line of battle, and is overlapped on either hand. 

Hence some great pervasive and consolidated wrong 
may exist in the presence of the Church, with hardly a 
perceptible power of rebuke on the part of the pulpit. 
The pulpit is occupied with pietism and not with politics, 
and men are busy with politics and not with pietism. 
The current phases of devotion are the staple of the pulpit, 
while intemperance, impurity, luxury, war, are off themes. 
What, for example, can be more hostile to the entire 
Christian temper than war, yet war never cost the Chris- 
tian world more than it costs it to-day. The Church is 
powerless in the presence of this evil. The passions of 
men sweep by it, and overflow it, and pass through it, 
and hardly honor it with a ripple. The Church has no 
purchase, no leverage, against it. It nourishes pietism, 
but loses humanity. It preaches a truth that is to over- 
come transgression, and opens no conflict with the trans- 
gressions nearest to it. The truth ceases to be a sword 
and becomes a wand of office. 

. It will be felt at once that incessant attack on specific 
sins is ineffectual and inadmissible. This is, in a degree, 
true. But the difficulty does not lie so much in the 
absence of a constant, harassing, hand-to-hand fight, as in 
the fact that the forces of truth are not made to face the 
right way and the right things. The secrets of life that 
are contained in them remain hidden, and men do not 
distrust the fact. The habitual vision of faith does not 
lie across the plains of the Kingdom of Heaven. Men*s 
ideals are remote from the purposes of God. 

Great weight is attached to revivals, but a revival may [ 
easily be an objectionable phase of pietism, a new 
contraction of things infinitely too narrow already. What 



PIETISM. l8l 

we wish to lay down are the lines of work along which 
the love of God is constantly passing into the lives of 
men, and building a kingdom of grace on earth. We 
have lost confidence in the assertion that this transition 
is sure to be made under the old method, and that we 
have only to abide by it. Pietism must break camp, 
dismiss its camp followers, and carry the glad tidings of 
a salvation that waits to sweep through every kingdom, 
physical, economic, social, pressing up toward a spiritual 
life that embraces them all, and redeems them all. All 
things travail together. 

Pietism is a more definite product than piety, than a 
life enlarged through all its area to the bounds of grace. 
The preacher loves distinct results — results that take on a 
numerical expression. Pietism meets this desire. It lays 
down lines of division and walks within them. It builds 
a fence, and cultivates the enclosed area as the vineyard 
of God. Visible landmarks are set up in all directions, 
but the fields, white for the harvest, which Christ saw 
from the well at Sychar, still remain ungathered. Pietism 
is forgetful of the largest love, and hence of the fullest 
message, of Christ. It is not a gospel for every creature 
in every relation of life. It may be thought that we are- 
trying to replace a pietism of reflection by one of action, 
a fanaticism of belief by one of labor, and so, like many 
another, fall short of the reposeful strength of the King- 
dom of Heaven. Whether this is the issue or not will 
turn on the largeness of our discourse on truth, the num- 
ber of the fountains of life from which we feed our life. 
It is catholicity of life that we urge, and philanthropy is 
only one of its modes of expression. 

Pietism, by narrowing down the life of faith and weak- 
ening its inner force, helps to justify agnosticism. The 



1 82 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

grace of God must chiefly express itself in the moral 
world. If the spiritual world does not disclose a truly 
divine presence, that presence is lost to us. Religious 
conventionalisms, the shallowness of faith, its manifold 
errors, the deceptive way in which it clothes human 
passion with religious expression, the inadequacy of the 
ends it proposes, the formality of the means it uses, all 
help to disguise religious truth and give color to the 
assertion that faith is a tangle of obscure thought and 
perverted instincts, which can be unravelled into nothing 
worth having except a growing temper of humanity. 
This feeling is concisely, and somewhat contemptuously, 
expressed in the memoirs of Mark Pattison. At one time 
he was strongly influenced by the movement toward 
Catholicism which occurred at Oxford under the lead of 
Mr. Newman. He failed to take the decisive step, and 
later his interest in this experience and kindred ones 
wholly died away. He explains the fact by the ^Mnnutri- 
tion of the religious brain and the development of the 
rational faculties.'* * 

This sarcasm would be of no moment did it not pierce 
to the quick a very weak point in religious development, 
this of pietism. Pietism is the fruit of a religious brain, 
crowded in development by special processes. It is op- 
posed to the wide unfolding of rational faculties. When, 
therefore, the prevailing type of a religious experience is 
deeply tinctured with pietism, the rational sense of more 
rational men takes offense. They turn from it ; they 
weary of it ; they grow away from it. The pietist is 
ready with the answer that Christ necessarily brings 
offense. Is it this offense that Christ brings ? I think 
not. It is hardness of thought and arrogance of feeling 

^ Page 208. 



PIETISM. 183 

that he offends, not our rational sympathies, our wide- 
ranging humanity, our inner coherence of Hfe. The 
agnostic will feel that, in scope of purpose, in justness 
and philanthropy of sentiment, John Stuart Mill had 
nothing to learn from the average Christian. Hence the 
profoundly unfortunate conclusion that the root of 
spiritual life lies not in religious faith, is not in a world 
knit through and through by spiritual forecast and spir- 
itual favor, but in a humanity that is just opening up in 
development. Positivism is ready to steal the very office 
ol faith in society. Humanity is put with freshness of 
power for piety, simply because piety is offered as pietism. 
Let us profoundly regret any religious spirit that through 
its self-imposed limitations stands rebuked in the presence 
of a positivism that sees more and feels more of the rest- 
less tide of human want, ebbing and flowing through this 
one moment of time, than do the servants of Christ, 
taught by all the centuries that come and go under the 
eye of God. 

The most radical evil in pietism — the isolation of re- 
ligious sentiment — is that it checks the development of 
manhood. Manhood, rightly understood, is the divine 
ideal embraced in individual and social life. We arrive 
at it, in the imperfect forms in which it offers itself to 
us, by a study of the facts of conduct, character, and 
social life. It is God's revelation in society of the beauty 
of moral excellence. The notion we entertain of man- 
hood expresses our penetration into the spiritual scheme 
of things. Pietism arises from a narrow estimate of our 
more immediately personal relations, particularly those to 
God. These two things, manhood and piety, should con- 
cur, and do concur, so far as both are rightly grasped. 
The fitting expression of piety is manhood, a fulness of 



1 84 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

response to the duties that lie upon us and the affections 
which surround us. The partial conceptions we are 
forming of manly character we often designate as honor ; 
while the correspondingly defective notions which arise 
in connection with piety are the innumerable forms of 
pietism. These two partial presentations more or less 
supplement each other in their defects. Honor lacks 
the patience and devotion of piety, and pietism misses 
the immediate insight into secular relations which man- 
hood enforces. While true character embraces both piety 
and manhood, they easily antagonize each other, first, by 
establishing different standards of excellence, and later, 
by scorning the virtues not contained in their own ideal. 
Hence the two tempers may settle down into mutual 
misapprehensions and repulsions. We suffer from cross- 
vision in the spiritual world, and have difficulty in bring- 
ing together our images of excellence in one clearly 
outlined object. We have been accustomed to separate 
between our earthward and heavenward seeking. It is 
the office of righteousness to unite the two in an ideal 
character, commanding the whole circle of virtues ; those 
which adjust , us to the immediate conditions of conduct, 
and those by which we understand its real trend. 

The partial separation between the manly and the 
religious type of character — a separation that is increased 
by every phase of pietism — has brought with it con- 
spicuous evils. The standard of honor is frequently 
more narrow than that of pietism, and is maintained with 
a like dogmatic temper. It leads the man of honor to 
scorn a piety that speaks lightly of his own creed. What- 
ever pietism^gains in depth of motives, is partially lost 
again by the unfitness and narrowness of the expression. 
Perfect conduct, pervaded by a profound spirit, rests not 



PIETISM, 185 

even as an ideal, with either tendency. The religious Hfc 
cannot fully justify itself to men till it unites honor and 
piety in manhood, good-will and reverence in righteous- 
ness ; till its path forward is defined by a thorough re- 
demption of the present hour, A life that is losing itself 
in its own pleasures, and one which lightens the labors of 
to-day only with the promise of to-morrow, are alike dis- 
tasteful, A life that deepens and widens itself every 
moment, that is gaining authority, that is visibly beautiful 
and waiting on more prolific beauty, can alone call out 
the sustained enthusiasm of the soul. Let the beauty of 
the Lord our God be upon us. 

The sources of piety and the sources of intellectual 
strength, the sources of religion and the sources of art, 
have tended to separation in the world's history. The 
humanist and the pietist have stood at opposite ex- 
tremes. There has been much in the development of 
religious character that has been repulsive. The Chris- 
tian has been as a patient who wears his plasters and 
swathing bands visibly about him, keeps an exact inven- 
tory of his ills, and fills the air Avith the odor of his 
diseases. 

Grecian art and intellectuality were accompanied with 
relatively light religious sentiments. While we may 
thoroughly understand that the vital forces in historic life 
were flowing in the deep, narrow channels of faith rather 
than in those of art, that such a cafion as that of Puritan- 
ism held the sweet streams that were to refresh the gar- 
den of God, we may still feel that these cold waters 
must be softened by much sunshine before they can 
quicken all living things. We may find rfcw emphasis 
in the prayer, Let the beauty of the Lord our God be 
upon us. 



1 86 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

For a long time art found admission with difificulty into 
the Christian Church, and when it did enter it missed, as 
in painting, that vigor in the sensuous terms of life which 
art must always covet. The Last Sacrament of St. 
Jerome is so spiritualized off the plane of the senses as to 
give but an uncertain hold to art, art that handles the 
world, as God handles it, in and by the perfect image of 
itself. There was a constant conflict in Christian art, as 
it gathered strength, between classical and religious sub- 
jects ; and the two terms were never reconciled, because 
neither faith nor art had risen to the point of union. Our 
piety should be like the box of precious ointment broken 
on the feet of Christ, filling the entire house with its 
grateful odor. Nor would Christ suffer any censure to 
fall on the act, though it seemed so far to transcend the 
close maxims of religious economy. 

The power to penetrate the perfected forms of life with 
the true vigor of life, or, better, to express the vigor of 
life under its purified forms, is the real office of faith, and 
pietism intermeddles with it in this its divine mission. Pie- 
tism is to be corrected point by point, fo be slowly widened 
in temper, saving at each transition its spirit of consecra- 
tion by redirecting it into more comprehensive and rational 
forms of expression. The laws of life wait to be an- 
nounced and enforced in all their manifold terms. We 
have no occasion to save our precious things that we may 
drop them later, one by one, in the endless stream of 
poverty and vice. We may lavish them at once in the ser- 
vice of the Master with a prodigality of faith far more 
effective than its parsimony, with a largeness of salvation 
preferable to every redemptive device, however just in 
itself. It is large ways not lit»tle ones that are to knit to- 
gether the world in strength. The last passage of life is 



I 



PIETISM. 187 

always union with the world, not separation from it ; is 
setting all things at their divine service under the mind of 
God. What we need to occupy ourselves with is the 
wide mastery of truth, its universal redemptive power. 
Our purpose is not so much to crowd and huddle the 
fugitives of the world into the Church, as a place of imme- 
diate safety, as it is to march a conquering Church into the 
world for its instant renovation. The community is the 
larger of the tw^o ideas. Not till the Church is co-exten- 
sive with the community will it be continuous with its 
own blessings. 



CHAPTER V. 

SPIRITUALISM. 

The word spiritualism has sunk so ignominiously by 
association with the bastard idea of spiritism as to require 
a new consecration for any high calHng. We mean by it 
the predominance of those incentives which are addressed 
to us through our spiritual nature, the fulness of that 
rational life which judges all things by their relation to 
righteousness, the rectitude of the soul itself. 

The constitution of the human mind is such that it is 
able to take on a later and higher growth. Without this 
growth it is in conflict with itself, its efforts are abortive, 
and both the motives and the means of advancement 
slowly slip from it. With spiritual growth its purposes 
become more comprehensive, its resources more abundant, 
its satisfaction in its work more complete, and the subor- 
dination of conflicting tendencies more manifest. It is a 
simple psychological fact, involved in our original make- 
up, that the aims of life must be continually thrown for- 
ward, or life loses its dignity and fitness, and begins, in 
brief periods, to perish within itself. Spiritualism, or the 
supremacy of the higher and purer activities over the 
lower and grosser ones, is the normal unfolding of the 
mind of man. Without it life fails to become truly 
rational, and rapidly falls off from its possibilities. 

The appetites and passions of men, in connection with 

i88 



SPIRITUALISM. 189 

their power to anticipate the future and provide for it, 
call forth the desires, and the desires become the steady 
incentives to a large circle of activities and sensibilities 
that are self-seeking. The refinements of civilization rest 
chiefly on this basis of desire, intensified by the large 
development of social life. There is another circle of 
ideas which men win more slowly, and in connection with 
which the affections, the disinterested feelings, are un- 
folded. The three great lines of distinction, each capable 
within itself of the most varied development, are the true, 
the beautiful, and the good. If these are so united as to 
enlarge and correct each other, a new movement of life, a 
fresh network of relations, are brought forward for the 
profound modification of character. This form of activity 
is sustained by the affections ; the entire line of develop- 
ment is lifted and becomes spiritual. New ends are 
established, and new principles of proportion rule con- 
duct. This is a result distinctly provided for in the 
original powers of mind and in the growth of society. If 
it fails of fulfilment, the mind loses impulse and its 
resources drop off. There is a demand within the mind 
itself for this transfer of centre. The empirical philoso- 
phy expresses the change in a different phraseology, but 
it recognizes it and magnifies it. With this philosophy it 
is the repression of self-seeking tendencies and the culti- 
vation of altruistic sentiments. The fundamental fact 
remains, however, though the method of conceiving it is 
diverse. Life becomes narrow, stagnant, poisonous, which 
does not constantly renew itself along its many flowing 
channels. It is a dead sea, made heavy and bitter by its 
own processes of evaporation. The mind relaxes its hold 
on spiritual relations, and tightens it on physical ones ; 
and the more as these lose their power to bless it. The 



190 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

pessimism of exacting desires, unable to quell their own 
hunger, is a foregone conclusion. 

It is in this field, cultivated by the lower sensibilities, 
that the higher insights enter. Character is sturdy, 
thrifty, and beautiful in the measure in which it gives 
expression, in these sensuous terms, to purer incentives, 
A truth that carries its harmony into the relations of 
society, a beauty that asserts itself in conduct, a righteous- 
ness that rectifies life in both its inner and outer lines of 
movement, provide separately and collectively a feast at 
which the soul can sit without weariness. 

Precisely the same need arises in society as in the 
individual. Society is constantly reaching a stage in 
progress which it cannot make, a step in ascent it cannot 
surmount. Its resources are more abundant than ever 
before, its powers are on the increase, yet division and 
disintegration, extreme wealth and extreme poverty, are 
more manifest, and the general and permanent prosperity, 
for which so much has been undergone, is missed, just as 
men are reaching it. Discontent prevails, and counsel 
is taken for strife and overthrow rather than for new 
modes of advance. Why is this? Simply because men 
will not be spiritualized, because they carry animalism 
into a region beyond itself that it cannot cover. Under 
these conditions poverty and wealth alike vitiate the 
mind, enhance selfishness, and narrow tendencies already 
too restricted. Society becomes like an endogenous 
plant that is strangled by its own processes. Hardness 
and inflexibility are on the increase. Each new deposit is 
forced into position with greater and greater stress. Out- 
ward enlargement is arrested, and there is no further room 
for inward growth. The energy of life is consumed in 
resisting itself. 



SPIRITUALISM. igi 

There is only one possible remedy for this suspension 
of social growth, spiritualism, a new harmony of feelings 
and actions on a higher plane, the substitution of pros- 
perity expressed in terms of the affections for prosperity 
measured by the desires and translatable into a cash 
account/ The moment men can find, truly find, their own 
good in the common good, their own joy in the enriched 
affections of all, they will have conquered life and discov- 
ered the conditions of social progress. When the poor 
are not blessed by the blessings of the rich, they think 
themselves impoverished by them ; they certainly are 
spiritually impoverished by them, and fall into that 
remediless want — an envious, resentful, peevish temper. 
If the rich are not tried by the trials of the poor, they 
think themselves happily rid of them. But in shaking 
them off they have shaken off all divine tenderness, 
all breadth of emotional response, all lingering by the 
watercourses of life, and are leaving to dry up and 
wither those delicate fibres, that network of succulent 
tissue, by which the spiritually disposed incorporate 
themselves w^ith the world, and feed upon it in its entire 
range of joy. The rich man may wonder that his pleas- 
ures are worth so little, fleeing so rapidly, and followed 
by so many dreary compensations. He may try to renew 
them by deepening the vicious taint in them ; he may 
test the worth of the sensibility that he is wasting by 
wasting it still more rapidly. There can be but one 
result, darkness, made more overwhelming by a frenzied 
effort to dispel it. On this plane of desire there is but 
one wisdom, the wisdom of economy — slow, measured 
expenditure and sufficient stolidity to bear the inevitable. 

The poverty of the selfishly rich and the selfishly poor 
in all life-giving pleasures ought not to surprise us. Life 



192 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 



is a thing of wide, concurrent action, and is successful 
according to the extent and harmony of that action. 
Both are rejecting, over wide fields, the contributions of 
men and of society to human happiness, and putting in 
their place partial, divisive, and conflicting passions. Both 
are refusing the only real possible birth of higher life — 
that of spiritualism, aims that are as wide as truth, as 
assured as righteousness, as comprehensive as beauty. 
These aims, sustained in their pursuit at every step by the 
affections, can renovate society and make it a living whole 
whose experiences of pleasure and sorrow penetrate it in 
all its parts. History confirms, sociology enforces, the 
necessity of this transition in the centres of action and 
feeling in each man and among men. It is provided for 
in our constitution and is being made by insensible stages 
of growth. It is also one that can be accelerated by the 
push and elasticity of voluntary powers, and the spiritual- 
izing vigor of truth in the free and open mind. It is to 
this last result that all the energies of devout men are 
directed. What we wish to point out more distinctly is 
that what we have now defined, hastily and inadequately, 
as a spiritualizing process, a pushing of life into its own 
proper field, is the work of Christ, his own conception of 
that work, the very sum and substance of that which is 
wrought by his4ove. 

The words of Christ, comprehensively rendered, do not 
readily accept any other interpretation. This is their 
inner force and outer import. It is quite admissible to 
use some fulness of proof in establishing a point so easily 
lost sight of as this. It is essential when a deep current 
of obscure convictions has for a long time concealed the 
truth, and left it but partially operative ; when the pre- 
dominance of supernaturalism in men's thoughts has led 



i 

111 ! 



n 



SPIRITUALISM. 193 

them to look for quite other lessons, and reluctantly to 
accept the wise and patient ways of God ; when carefully 
and artificially elaborated dogma and sporadic piety have 
helped to hide the paths of progress, to emphasize anew 
the first terms in spiritual life, and revive, in their primi- 
tive force, the words of Christ, as he leads us forward 
toward God. We believe that the teachings of Christ 
tend simply and directly to carry us onward in this 
spiritual development planted in the nature of man, and 
in the entire growth of society ; and this lesson we desire 
to enforce. The whole movement, indeed, centres in God, 
in whom all truth, beauty, righteousness are gathered up 
in personal, emotional power ; but this fact only defines 
the form of the enforcement, and does not alter the very 
nature of the transition. 

Christ explicitly declares : *' This is life eternal that 
they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus 
Christ whom thou hast sent." ^ Life eternal is spiritual 
knowledge. His declaration to the woman of Samaria 
bears the same import : ** Whosoever drinketh of the 
water that I shall give him shall never thirst ; but the 
water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water 
springing up into everlasting life." ^ He gave the same 
truth a wider proclamation on the great day of the feast : 
'^ If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He 
that believeth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his 
belly shall flow rivers of living water." ^ 

Not unlike in force was the very different image ad- 
dressed to Nicodemus : *' Except a man be born again, 
he cannot see the kingdom of God." * Birth stands for a 
higher phase of life, one disunited from a lower life ; and 

^ John xvii., 3. \Tohn vii., 37. 

2Johniv., 14. -^Johniii., 3. 

13 



194 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

this higher Hfe is born of water and spirit, of a purified 
and deepened experience. This is made plainer by the 
emphatic assertion : '' Verily, verily I say unto you. He 
that heareth my word, and believeth in him that sent me 
hath everlasting life . . . He is passed from death 
unto life.'* ' Everlasting life is not the reward of insight; 
it is involved in the insight itself. Thus, in Luke, it is 
affirmed : " The kingdom of God is within you " ^ ; and 
in Mark : '' Have salt within yourselves, and have peace 
one with another." ^ 

This inner life, in its own distinctness, is to have its 
own line of development. New wine is to be put into 
new bottles and both are to be preserved. 

There is no more perfect image of inner illumination 
than light. This is a favorite enforcement of Christ. He 
says of himself : '' I am the light of the world." * Again: 
*' I am the light of the world, he that followeth me shall 
not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." ^ 
So the apostle John opens his gospel with the declaration : 
'' In him was life and the life was the light of men." * 
*^ That was the true light which lighteth every man that 
cometh into the world." ^ But light is in perfect fellow- 
ship with our powers. In the spiritual world we receive 
it and reflect it, '' Ye are the light of the world." '' Let 
your light so shine before men that they may see your 
good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven." ^ 
On the purity of this light personal well-being depends. 
** The light of the body is the eye : if, therefore, thine eye 
be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if 

^ John v., 24. ^ John viii., 12. 

'^ Luke xvii., 21. ^ John i., 4. 

2 Mark ix., 50. ' John i., 9. 

^ John ix., 5. ^ Matt, v., 16. 



SPIRITUALISM. 195 

thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. 
If, therefore, the light that is in thee be darkness, how 
great is that darkness ! " ' 

That which specifically corresponds in the spiritual 
world to light is truth. Christ is the way, the truth, and 
the life. The spirit of God is the spirit of truth, that 
guides us into all truth. Our freedom is won by the 
truth : '' Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall 
make you free." '^ Sanctity arises in reception of the 
truth : '' Sanctify them through the truth, thy word is 
truth." ^ What more explicit or more comprehensive or 
more glowing statement could be given of our relation to 
God than this ; it is sharing with him the light and free- 
dom of the truth. 

But there remains another image which is hardly an 
image, it so touches the very substance of things. Life, 
that intangible something which stirs so potently among 
sensuous facts, and at the same time lies at the very centre 
of spiritual ones, seems, above all conceptions, to indicate 
the invisible pathway of thought by which we penetrate 
into the region of divine things. This is the supreme 
image on which Christ is ever laying the burden of his 
message. Life and death, lying at the lower and nearer 
end of this scale of organic being, illustrate and define 
life and death at the higher and farther extremity. Life 
is the expansion of power, death its overthrow. Holiness 
is rising into life, sin is sinking into death. The resources 
of life are gathered in Christ. ^' In him was life " ; and 
to share his spirit is to enter into this life. '' The hour is 
coming, and now is when the dead shall hear the voice of 
the Son of God, and they that hear shall live." * To miss 

^ Matt, vi., 22. -^ John xvii., 17. 

^John viii., 32. •* John v., 24. 



196 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

his life by unbelief is to pass into the condemnation of 
death. We live and move and have our being in God. 
"Because I live ye shall live also," ^ says Christ. ^' He 
that eateth me, even he shall live by me.'* ^ The dead 
hear the voice of the Son of God, and live. God is not a 
God of the dead, but of the living. '' He that believeth 
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.'* ^ " Verily, 
verily, I say unto you. If a man keep my saying, he shall 
never see death." * '' He that believeth not the Son, shall 
not see life." ^ '' Ye will not come to me that ye might 
have life." ' '^ I am the bread of life." ' '^ am the liv^ 
ing bread which came down from heaven ; if any man eat 
of this bread, he shall live forever." ^ '^ I am the resur- 
rection and the life." ^ We are to understand these words 
of Christ in a profound way. The very substance of 
spiritual life, that on which it feeds, and the power by 
which it feeds, are held in the life of God, the life of 
truth which we share with him. To draw forth and bring 
forward this life is the work of Christ ; and this life, as the 
highest term in life, rules all life. We live by it, and we 
perish without it. All casements give admission' to this 
light of life. 

This insight involves a transfer of the centre of activity 
upward. The intentions and affections and the pro- 
founder thoughts which sustain them must take the place 
of the appetites and passions and desires, and the sagacity 
which is developed- in connection with them. This is 
repeatedly affirmed by Christ, and has justly been termed 
the secret of Christ. ' This subjection of the entire life to 
the higher laws which spring up in apprehension of the 

^ John xiv., 19. ^ John viii,, 51. "^ John vi., 48. 
^ John vi., 57. ^ John iii., 36. ^ John vi., 51. 

•'• John xi., 25. 6" John v., 40. ^ John xi., 25. 



1 



SPIRITUALISM. 197 

true, the beautiful, the good ;\ this growth of all life out of 
these deeper impulses, this is the mind of Christ. ^* If any 
man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up 
his cross and follow me. For whosoever w^ill save his life 
shall lose it ; and whosoever will lose his life for my s'ake 
shall find it." ^ Life is here contrasted with itself, its 
lower with its higher forms. Life in its more immediate, 
sensuous expression must be repressed in favor of its more 
remote and spiritual development. Thus both forms of 
life are gained. Yielding to exorbitant desire, life is Ipst 
on both sides. The desires have no sufficient law and no 
adequate reward within themselves. They consume the 
life which they feed ; they perish in their own excess. 
What can it profit a man if he win all the conditions of 
giatification — the whole world, — and sacrifice, in their pur- 
suit, the only powers that can enable him to appropriate 
with real pleasure these. gains? The affections are the 
assimilating organs of the soul ; these lost, and all is lost. 
The eye with which we see is of more moment than the 
beauties of any one order offered to it. , We can never 
wisely sacrifice a power in behalf of things addressed to 
that power. The insubordinate action of inferior powers 
can never compensate us for the subordinate action of 
the same powers ; much less for the activity of the higher 
powers they are displacing. We truly possess the world 
by our insights, and ownership without insights is the 
poverty of the spirit made conspicuous. 

Christ often returns to this fundamental principle, and 
sustains it by allied truths.^ ^^ Take no thought for your 
life, what ye shall eat ; neither for the body, what ye shall 

^ Matt, xvi., 24. 

^ Matt. X., 39 ; Mark viii., 35 ; Luke ix., 24 ; Luke xiv., 33 ; John 
xii., 15. 



198 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

put on. The life is more than meat, and the body is more 
than raiment." ^ " He that hath, to him shall be given ; 
and from him that hath not, shall be taken even that 
which he hath." ^ This is the law of growth. Life sup- 
pressed, perishes ; life nourished, rapidly gains power. Our 
work must be done under this principle. The same truth 
is emphasized under another form. The growth of the 
Kingdom of Heaven is likened to seed that first yields the 
blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. The 
entire question is one of life, and the changing centres of 
life. This is also shown in the subordination of the means 
of life to life itself. The Sabbath was made for man, and 
not man for the Sabbath. Hence also the emphasis laid by 
Christ on a teachable spirit. The child is the most perfect 
image of the receptive temper. '' Suffer little children to 
come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the 
kingdom of God." ^ 

Closely allied with a true readiness to receive, is readi- 
ness to give. He who is teachable is prepared to teach. 
'' If any desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, 
and servant of all. And he took a child and set him in 
the midst of them ; and when he had taken him in his 
arms, he said unto them, Whosoever shall receive one of 
such children in my name, receiveth me ; and whosoever 
shall receive me, receiveth not me, but him that sent 
me." * The essential thing in the Kingdom of Heaven, 
which is also the essential thing in the soul's insight into 
life, is a cheerful submission to the moral conditions 
which enclose us, and mastery under them and by them. 

When we look at the work of Christ as an effort to 
secure this second birth, this uplift of the centre of life, 

' Luke xii., 22. ^ Luke xviii., 16 ; Mark x., 14. 

^ Mark iv., 25 ; Lukexix., 26. ** Mark ix., 36 ; Mark x., 42. 



SPIRITUALISM. 199 

we readily understand his strong language concerning 
wealth. It is penetrating, but neither unwise nor untimely. 
'^ How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the 
kingdom of God. For it is easier for a camel to go 
through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter into 
the kingdom of God.*' ' The desire for wealth is the 
most central and universal of the desires. It especially 
awakens the echoes of self-interest in every apartment of 
the thoughts. It stands for an intense life on the level 
of personal interests. This desire, therefore, may well 
receive the stroke of rebuke aimed at a narrow and mis- 
chievous type of manhood. Christ is never careful to 
make all the corrections of thought which the truth ulti- 
mately calls for. The immediate force of his words 
would be much reduced by such a method. When the 
primary principle is recognized, its qualifications come 
readily. He speaks of the pursuit of wealth as one might 
speak of appetite to those subject to it. It is something 
which must be conquered at all costs. It stands for the 
dominance of desire. The real contrast of the defective 
and the perfect form of life needs nowhere to be drawn 
more sharply or with a firmer hand than at this very 
point — the pursuit of wealth. The words of Christ, 
extreme as they seem to be, are perfectly wholesome. 
They owe their cogency to the great danger of destroy- 
ing life by the means of life ; to the universality and 
persistency of the error of submitting the soul to its 
first terms of expansion. To have qualified, then and 
there, these words of revelation, would have been to emas- 
culate them. 

The estimate that Christ put on the living processes of 
faith is also seen in the points of censure he makes against 

^ Luke xviii., 24 ; Luke xvi., 13 ; Luke xii., 20. 



200 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

the Pharisees. '' Now do ye, Pharisees, make clean the 
outside of the cup and the platter ; but your inward part 
is full of ravening and wickedness. Ye fools, did not he 
that made that which is without, make that which is 
within, also ? But rather give alms of such things as ye 
have ; and behold all things are clean unto you. But^ 
woe unto you, Pharisees ! for ye tithe mint and rue, and 
all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love 
of God : these ought ye to have done and not to leave 
the others undone." ^ '' Beware of the leaven of the 
Pharisees, which is hypocrisy." ^ All turns, censure and 
praise alike, on the inner force of the life. Note the 
beatitudes in this particular. It is the spirit of peace, 
purity, mercy, and meekness, the heart that hungers after 
righteousness, that are blessed. The favor of Heaven 
descends like dew and rain on these virtues. 

Thus far we have spoken of the nature of the trans- 
formation in the life of man sought for by Christ. We 
turn to the lines of duty laid upon the obedient as another 
expression of the same thing. These also look to that 
change of intellectual and emotional centre which we are 
trying to enforce. The two great commandments on 
which hang all the law and the prophets are : ^^ Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with 
all thy soul, and with all thy mind. Thou shalt love 
thy neighbor as thyself." ^ Here certainly the attention 
is carried at once over to the affections and to love, the 
chief affection, as the fulfilling of life. These command- 
ments are weakened in their force by regarding them 
simply as injunctions to be met at once. They are rather 
long lines of light, unending changes, which bear us into 

^ Luke xi., 39. - Luke xii., i ; Luke xx., 46. 

^ Matt, xxii., 37 ; Mark xii., 30. 



bPIRITUALIS^r. 2or 

the centre of the divine mind and the higher Hfe under 
it. We are to grow into perfect love, and this leaves 
nothing more to be desired. We cannot direct the 
attention too steadily to these commands as holding the 
inner law of spiritual things. They easily enfold all 
forms of praiseworthy action. " Therefore, all things 
whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye 
even so unto them." ' '' Love your enemies ; do good to 
them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray 
for them which despitefuUy use you." ^ Admirable as 
are 'hese injunctions, they are only single off-shoots of the 
parent principle. Give us that principle, and these follow. 
Lay down these commands without the divine impulse of 
love to supply the spirit of obedience, and they perish 
almost at once. 

There is the favorite injunction of Christ that especially 
indicates the complete consciousness with which the life 
of the spirit was permeated, in his estimate of it: *' If 
any man have ears to hear let him hear " ^ ; '' Take heed, 
therefore, how ye hear." ^ All things are to proceed under 
clear, inner light. It is a pure, intellectual atmosphere 
that is to embrace and offer in their intrinsic beauty all 
the conditions of spiritual conduct. The soul maintains 
its poise within itself. The range of the life is indicated 
in both directions. It is to possess the entire heart ; it is 
to spread over the entire world. It looks to the highest 
possible, personal attainments. We are to be perfect, 
even as our Father w^hich is in heaven is perfect. And 
this gospel of salvation is to be preached to every crea- 
ture. The pyramid is as broad as the earth, and rises 
as high as heaven. The tree of life grows by the river of 

^ Matt, vii., 12. "^ Markvii., i6. 

2 Luke vi., 27, 35 ; Luke xiv., 13 ; Matt, v., 43. ^ Luke viii., 18. 



202 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

life, yields its fruits perpetually, and, with its leaves, heals 
the nations. 

A most significant thing in this higher life, enjoined 
upon us, is its relation to God, the support it finds in him, 
and its relation to man, its nourishment under surround- 
ing spiritual conditions. Both serve to define its nature. 
The relation in life that interprets to us all that is most 
tender, truthful, and noble is transferred to God. We 
find our way to him along a path cheered by every 
suggestion of consolation and help. We come to him 
as Our Father who art in heaven. All that is gathered 
up in parenthood, on its two sides of strength and love, 
is made to lighten the lines of approach to God. We 
abide in his presence under the most perfect form of love 
known to us, the fatherly and motherly affections which 
unfold with our own being, the sepals and petals which 
guard, nourish, and beautify the new-found life. This re- 
lationship is further presented to us in its most patient 
and benignant form in that gospel within a gospel, the 
parable of the prodigal son. The all-embracing impulse 
in the household of faith is that love of God granted 
unto us in the first commandment, the entire life drawn 
outward, upward tending, toward God. This carries 
with it the opening of the mind in insight into all 
spiritual things, the true, the beautiful, the good ; and 
the springing up at once of those affections which are 
nourished by and nourish this spiritual unfolding of our 
powers. 

The openness of this way is indicated in the parable of 
the publican, whose simple petition, God be merciful to 
me a sinner, swept aside every obstruction. It is enforced 
by the parable of the lost sheep, and the piece of silver 
that was lost. Man may not only return to God, he 



SPIRITUALISM. 203 

is diligently sought after by him : ^^ There is joy in 
the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that 
repenteth/' ' 

The spiritual character of our union with God is ex- 
plicitly afifirmed, and we are not allowed to search for it 
on any lower plane than that of inner life. '^God is a 
spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in 
spirit and in truth." ^ '' Of his fulness have all we received, 
and grace for grace." '' 

The part taken by Christ in this union of our thoughts 
with God is abundantly defined. As indicated in the 
passage last given, we are partakers in his fulness in 
lineal descent, virtue by virtue. No man cometh unto 
the Father but by him, because he is the truth and the 
life. He embraces them both. A variety of images are 
used which unfold this thought on all sides to the light. 
He is the door to the fold, and, in the same breath, its 
shepherd. He is the vine of which we are the branches, 
the bread of life on which we feed. This last image is 
amplified and put with a literalness that compels us to 
spiritualize it. ^^ Verily, verily, I say unto you, except 
ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, 
ye have no life in you." * The crass character of the 
image cuts us off from any gross use of it. We make 
nothing of it, till we make everything of it, till it means 
for us the appropriation and assimilation of the life of 
Christ.^ 

Thus are we led into the fellowship of God, and it is 
one of light and life and love. The Comforter that is 
sent unto us, that dwelleth in us forever, that takes of 
the things of Christ and shows them unto us, is the 

^ Luke XV., 10. -^ John i., 16. 

2 John iv., 24 ; John i., 12. •* John vii., 153. 



204 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

Spirit of Truth. All is love. '* If a man love me he will 
keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we 
will come unto him and make our abode with him." ^ In 
whatever direction we turn, there is one spiritual presence, 
one revelation, one impulse. '' When he, the Spirit of 
Truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth." ^ '^ As 
the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you ; con- 
tinue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye 
shall abide in my love ; even as I have kept my Father's 
commandments and abide in his love." ^ '^ And now I 
am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and 
I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own 
name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be 
one, as we are." ^ Nor is this any idle fellowship of 
unproductive sentiments in a mystical world of dreams. 
It is a fellowship of labor, suffering, conquest. '^ Ye shall^ .1 
indeed, drink of the cup that I drink of; and with the I 
baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized.'* ^ l| 
** Ye call me Master and Lord ; and ye say well ; for so 
I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed 
your feet ; ye ought also to wash one another's feet. 
For I have given you an example, that ye should do as 
I have done to you." ^ But this service has in it no i 
element of bondage, it is wholly one of loving insight. 
'' Henceforth I call you not servants ; for the servant 
knoweth not what his Lord doeth ; but I call you friends ; 
for all things that I have heard of my Father I have 
made known unto you." ' 

This relation of man to God contains and implies his 
relation to his fellow-men ; and any philosophy of life will 

^ John vi., 23. ^ John xv., 9. ^ John x., 39. 

'^ John xvi., 13. '* John xviii., 11. * John xiii., 13. 
''John XV., 15. 



li 



SPIRITUALISM. 205 

meet with great difficulty in enforcing the fellowship of 
humanity that is not able to root it thoroughly in the very 
constitution of the spiritual world. Out of the abundant 
energy of the first command, the second command springs 
readily : Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Nor 
was Christ content to leave the injunction to the render- 
ing of men. He defined the most essential term in it, 
and indicated the method of fulfilment in the beautiful 
parable of the good Samaritan. The injunction of love 
is not left by Christ as a general principle simply. He 
returns to it constantly, with much tenderness, as the 
true bond between his disciples. As the conditions of 
discipleship give free play to the affections, so should 
they knit all together in one vigorous fellowship of love. 
^' A new *' — new in its vital force — '' commandment I 
give unto you, That ye love one another ; as I have 
loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall 
all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love 
one for another.'* * " This is my commandment. That ye 
love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love 
hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for 
his friend." '^ This love is to be no unfruitful affection. 
It is to find expression in every act of service from the 
least to the greatest, from a cup of cold water to the 
giving of life. Honor in this fraternity of Christ should 
be found in following in the steps of the Master. '^ Ye 
know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion 
over them, and they that are great exercise authority 
upon them. But it shall not be so among you ; but who- 
soever will be great among you, let him be your minis- 
ter ; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be 
your servant ; even as the Son of Man came not to be 

^ John xiii.. 34. - John xv., 12-15, 17. 



206 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a 
ransom for many/' ^ j 

But this temper of kindly servijce is possible among men 
of grave faults and petty infirmities only in connection 
with forgiveness ; and Christ lays down the law of 
forgiveness in its most absolute form. There is to be 
in us a divine tenderness cherishing every germ of life. 
There is not only not the least trace of an implacable 
temper in Christ, there is no recognition of any principle 
of justice that stands in the way of forgiveness when 
forgiveness is sought. '' How oft," inquires Peter, ^* shall 
my brother sin against me, and I forgive him ? till seven 
times.? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee. Until 
seven times; but, Until seventy times seven." ^ This 
forgiveness is enjoined as being at one with the divine 
method. ^' And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye 
have ought against any : that your Father also which is f 
in heaven may forgive you your trespasses." ^ No words 
certainly can express more explicitly and in more varied 
directions than do these words of Christ that the thing 
sought by him was a new centre of life, planted in the 
affections of men. 

We have striven to show how Christ defines this change 
in itself, the lines of duty which he lays down in connection 
with it, the relations which men sustain by it to God and 
to their fellow-men. Its nature is also involved in the tests 
given us by which we are to judge whether this transfer of 
life has been effected. They are of the simplest and 
plainest order. Every good tree is to bring forth good 
fruit. As Bacon felt that all knowledge should be fruitful, 
so Christ would have all righteousness beneficent. ** A 

^ Matt. XX., 25. '^ Matt, xviii., 21 ; Luke xvii., 3. 

'-' Mark xi., 24. 



SPIRITUALISM. 207 

good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth 
forth that which is good." ^ Our kinship with Christ is 
one of well-doing. ^^ My mother and my brethren are 
those which hear the word of God and do it." "^ When 
John the Baptist sought evidence of the Messiahship 
of Christ, Christ made answer, *^ Go your way, and tell 
John what things ye have seen and heard ; how that 
the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the 
deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the Gospel is 
preached."^ 

The censures of Christ involve the same criterion, *' Go 
ye and learn w^hat that meaneth, I will have mercy and not 
sacrifice ; for I am not come to call the righteous, but sin- 
ners to repentance." ^ '' Those things which proceed out 
of the mouth come forth from the heart ; and they defile 
the maUo" ^ There is nothing which drew so severe a 
rebuke from Christ as a disposition to substitute traditions 
and rites for large obedience. '^ Laying aside the com- 
mandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the 
washing of pots and cups : and many other such things ye 
do." ^ '' Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! 
for ye pay tithe of mint, and anise and cummin, and have 
omitted the weightier matters of the law — judgment, 
mercy, and faith ; these ought ye to have done and not to 
leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at 
a gnat, and swallow a camel." ^ The obedience of Christ 
proceeds in full knowledge. Blessed are your eyes, for 
they see ; and your ears, for they hear. The scribe, 
taught in the things of the Kingdom of Heaven, is versa- 

' Luke vi., 45 ; xiii., 9 : viii., 15. •* Matt, ix., 13. 

2 Luke viii., 21. * Matt, xv., 18. 

^ Luke vii., 22. " Mark vii., 8. 

" Matt, xxiii., 23, 



2o8 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

tile in their use, and brings forth the new and the old as 
occasion calls for them. 

This life of the spirit leads one to put away all asceti- 
cism. Christ came eating and drinking. Soundness of 
mind and soundness of body are ultimately identical. 
^' For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee j 
or to say. Arise, and walk.**' 

A method like this of Christ is applicable to all men 
under all circumstances, and so has found admission aside 
from his presence. '' Many shall come from the east and 
the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and 
Jacob, in the Kingdom of Heaven.*'^ ** Other sheep, I 
have, which are not of this fold : them also I must bring, 
and they shall hear my voice ; and there shall be one fold 
and one shepherd.** ^ This divine grace proceeds always 
under the one ethical law, ^^ Unto whomsoever much is 
given, of him shall much be required.*'* 

It is not easy to overestimate the concurrent and 
accumulated force of these words of Christ. They all 
look, from every variety of position, toward a life built 
up within itself, according to its own constitution, into 
strength, and so into the grace of God. God gives to 
those who have. Nor are there any passages in the 
Gospels that cast any other light on thd subject. There 
are a few, taken by themselves, as ^* He that believeth and 
is baptized shall be saved,'* ^ which might perplex us, but, 
in the general blaze of light, they also reflect the spiritu- 
ality of the things about them. No precept in the Gos- 
pels enforces a dogma or a rite as in itself a duty. AH 
rests on the basis of naturalism, the constitution of man, 

^ Matt, ix., 5. 2 John x., 16. 

2 Matt, viii., ii ; l.uke xiii., 29. ** Luke xiv., 48. 

^ Mark xvi., 16. 



SPIRITUALISM. 209 

of society, and of the Kingdom of Heaven. Beliefs and 
duties are grounded in their spiritual occasions, and 
enforced by them. 

Even more weight than has been laid may well be laid 
on the method of instruction by Christ. It is by illustra- 
tions, by parables, by facts of experience. The general 
statement, when it comes, rests back on examples. Many 
things are gained by this manner of expounding recondite 
truth. The disciples were not allowed to put their own 
facile interpretations on the words of Christ, and to sup- 
pose that they understood them, when they had but 
begun to penetrate them. This has been a great dififi- 
culty in religious instruction ; a superficial, conventional 
sentiment has come to incrust the words in which it is 
uttered, and to hide from the eye the germs of truth they 
contain. The disciples were put to their wit's end by the 
words of Christ, and were disposed to complain of the 
obscurity of his parables. If we mean by clearness of 
expression the power to convey ideas, then the instruc- 
tions of Christ were most lucid. Ways which would have 
seemed plainer to the disciples would have hidden from 
them the burden of the message. Awakened attention 
was the first condition of apprehension. 

This method gave also an inductive basis to the dis- 
courses of Christ, which quite distinguishes them from 
current religious methods, magnifying their own verbal 
distinctions, and leaving wholly behind them empirical 
facts. Thus when Christ justified healing on the Sabbath 
by the argument : '' Doth not each one of you on the 
sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead 
him away to watering? And ought not this woman, 
being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, 

lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the 
14 



2IO THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

sabbath day ? '' * he was introducing a new method of 
looking at religious truth, and one which grew directly 
out of the facts of life. 

The parable was fitted to make the impression that the 
world, in all its details, was full of the divine mind ; full 
of lessons designed to put us in living interchange of 
truth with it. The remoteness and unreality which attach 
to spiritual things were dispelled, and the physical form 
and spiritual force of events were set at one again. 

This figurative method of Christ compelled the disciples 
to break step, to take long strides and great leaps in 
catching up with the truth ; to overlook superficial agree- 
ments, and seek after the profound, the real, points at 
which the assertion and the illustration, the principle and 
its image, coalesce. A lazy interpretation of the parables 
without penetration lands one in absurdities, and the 
truth must be kept aloof from the illustration at the same 
time that it is reflected by it. The image in the mirror is 
not more distinct from the mirror itself than is the very 
truth from the things which unfold it. 

For this reason, because the right rendering turns on 
penetrative insight, the image has wonderful power to 
preserve the truth and to transmit it, beyond the reach of 
conventional perversions, from person to person and period 
to period. That we save our lives by sacrificing them is 
a riddle which each man must expound successfully from 
the secrets of his own soul. The astute dialectician finds 
difficulty in subjecting truth, put in this form, to his 
barren processes. He must translate it into dogma before 
he can ply it with inferences, and lead it on and on, far 
from the corrections of experience and the government of 
life. The words of Christ are full of an emotional ele- 

^ Luke xiii., 15. 



SPIRITUALISM. 2X1 

ment, are penetrated by living terms, which make it 
difficult to turn them into abstractions. 

The liberty of the disciple is thus fully preserved. 
There is a direct appeal to his own mind and heart, which 
brings the problem of life home to him for his personal 
solution. The thoughts are brought near the truth and 
left alone with it as by the words of no other teacher. 

We shall not understand what Christ aims to do for 
men, the transformation he desires to work in them, till 
we understand what he himself was. It is his own life, 
his estimate of truth, that are the conquering powers of 
the spiritual world. Christ was a presentation of pure and 
patient love as a ruling force in the human soul. On this 
basis he built his life, under this idea he ripened it to its 
end. The love here opened for our admiration is a 
rational affection ; a feeling that runs along the lines of 
truth and makes them rivers of life ; a sentiment that 
clings, with unwavering insight, to the law of righteous- 
ness as the upward tending strength of the growing 
spirit ; an emotion that breaks forth in scorching rebuke 
of sin, because it would purge the soil as by fire of the 
brambles and thorns which hold it from the uses of men. 
Principles and precepts were in. the world prior to Christ, 
the fitting forms of life were more or less present to the 
imagination of men, but the divine force was hardly 
awakened in the soul by which these principles were to 
receive power, these forms be fulfilled in living things. 
Christ made it manifest that there were fountains of affec- 
tion deep enough in God and in man — in man because in 
God — to thoroughly refresh and fertilize the world. He 
wrought out the problem of life on the practical side. 
Henceforth it became in order to exhort men. Be not 
overcome of evil, but overcome evil with TOod. 



212 



THE NEW THEOLOGY. 



The entire struggle of Christ, his bearing our infirmities 
and carrying our sins, is found in this confronting within 
his own spirit of every error and sin, and putting them 
aside with a new assertion of truth and love — truth that 
stands for love, and love that stands for truth. The 
bruised reed was not broken, the smoking flax was not 
quenched, his voice was not heard in the street. One 
remedy, one only and one always, was with him, a deeper 
assertion of the divine life of the soul. If I be lifted up, 
I will draw all men unto me. If this victory of love, 
binding the soul to God and to men in holiness, is made 
complete in me, it shall be the victory of all time. Those 
night watches upon the mountains were the bracing up 
the spirit within itself, as it held fast to its purpose ; the 
conquering power of spiritual purity ; the giving of all, 
and so the winning of all. The transfiguration followed 
one of these struggles in which the soul wrestled success- 
fully — clinging to the redemptive grace of God — against 
all the discouragements, disappointments, delays, passions, 
perversities, follies and foolish rhapsodies, that penetrate 
the atmosphere of the world, like heat and cold, and make 
it a bitter place for tender, pure, and loving spirits. The 
transfiguration was a visible expression of a transmutation 
which this unquenchable love shall make universal. When 
Christ, having turned aside not one moment from the 
simple declaration of truth, having yielded nothing and 
precipitated nothing in the conflict of sin with holiness, 
hatred with love, was able, on the cross — a defeat of 
grace from which all spiritual victories take their date, a 
victory of transgression from which the growing over- 
throw of evil is ever proceeding — to say. Father forgive 
them, they know not what they do, he was also able to 
add. It is finished, into thy hands I commit my spirit. 



SPIRITUALISM. " 213 

All is one, the life of Christ, the work of Christ, the sal- 
vation of men— the soul knit together within itself in 
pure affections, the life transferred to its eternal centre 
in God. 

The one thing which explains the world in its confusion, 
suffering, and darkness is growth — movement forward into 
order, life, light. This growth is at once most compre- 
hensive and most special, most extensive and most minute. 
It aims at the perfection of the individual as the condition 
of perfect society, while society draws into its develop- 
ment from above and below all spiritual and physical 
resources. This growth of man involves a rhythmic 
pulsation that extends through and through the world of 
which he is a portion. Motion is a most exhilarating 
physical experience. Motion upward, motion that dif- 
fuses itself broadly, is, in its sense of concurrent and 
sympathetic power, the most animating form of motion. 
Growth, such growth as that of which we are now speak- 
ing, involves the most extended, concurrent, upward 
movement ; one of w^hich physical motion is but a feeble 
image. He who feels it, sees its conditions, experiences 
its*delight, catches sight of its implications, can scarcely 
make any question as to the worth of life, or the wisdom 
with which it is ordered. The discouragements of the 
moment are revealed only by the light which lies before 
us ; the ills that are about us are the incentives to the 
good that is to displace them. The sense of confusion 
arises from the scope of the movement which encloses 
us, and its delay from the magnitude of the field it is 
covering. We are oppressed with the weight of immeas- 
urable things, but only thus have we the sweep of immor- 
tality. We miss the pleasures that are near us, but only 
because we have not yet learned how best to appropriate 



214 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

all pleasure. We mistake many things and pervert many^ 
because this growth is of our very substance, must be 
self-achieved and slowly permeated by the light of our 
own consciousness. We are held back by the faults and 
failures and sins of others only because our supreme 
profiting lies in the fulfilments and virtues of all men,, 
because we harvest not one pitiful field set apart as 
our own, but the whole world ; because love — the love 
of wisdom and the wisdom of love — pulsating with the 
stroke of spiritual health through all rational life, throbs 
sympathetically in our veins, and takes its measure in us 
from the impulse of the divine mind, seeking for itself the 
Kingdom of Heaven. 

We meet with difficulty in grasping this idea of growth,, 
because, by a strange perversion of ideas, things seem to 
us coherent, involved in each other in all ways, while acts, 
personal efforts, seem isolated, capable of sudden throes 
of power and quick upheavals of creative energy. It is 
thought that is, of its own nature, thoroughly and forever 
coherent. Intellectual, spiritual creations must be tra- 
versible in all directions along all lines of connection. 
The cement of things is thought, but thought itself is 
struck through with rational order in every movement. 
Failing of this it ceases to be thought. Incoherent 
progress in the spiritual world, a transformation not 
known to itself, is self-contradictory. Things may be built 
together, — they have grown together that they might be 
in , closer sympathy with mind — thoughts, spiritual affec- 
tions, cannot be built together. They must in every 
stage of progress pass up into the light by their own 
movement. The spiritual pace of the universe is all that 
we can bear. We are gathered up as rapidly as we are 
able into the rational movement of the divine mind. 



SPIRITUALISM. 215 

This fact felt, and so accepted, and there is the same 
open vision and deHghtful mystery in the progress of 
the world that there is in the fragrant summer dawn as 
it breaks into day. We wish not to hasten the glorious 
disclosure. There is too much in each moment to allow 
us to be impatient for the next. It is the child, not 
the man, that deals so obscurely and weakly with what 
he has as to turn hope into the fret of weariness, and 
to make pleasure yield only a desire for the next en- 
joyment in order. Peace, rest in motion, the power to 
pursue good, this is the divine gift, not to be given but 
to be won. 

In this growth we need a naturalism which makes our 
entire path coherent, interlaced each moment with one 
rational movement ; we need a supernaturalism which 
nourishes our sense of power, and puts us in conscious 
fellowship with the Supreme Power that rules the current 
of events on which we are borne. These are the conditions 
and the motives of our spiritual manhood. We must also 
understand that conventional forms of thought and con- 
ventional forms of religious action, dogmatism and pie- 
tism, are only provisional, are to be constantly reshaped 
by more penetrative and more comprehensive vision, as 
we move forward in personal and social attainment, as 
we develop the spiritual life that takes to itself, and 
harmonizes within itself, all life. We must attain that 
spiritualism, which sees all things, understands them all, 
and enjoys them all, from that centre of reason which 
rests in the Divine Mind. 

The New Theology is not then new, but as old as the 
world in the inner force which brings it forward. It 
indicates, indeed, a productive spring-tide of thought, but 
its seeds are those of many previous seasons. It is one 



2l6 THE NEW THEOLOGY. 

more movement, standing in file with a thousand others 
past and to come, by which the limitations of knowledge 
give way, and we are enabled to take another step up- 
ward in the revelation of God, another step forward in 
the largeness of the gospel of Christ. 

Naturalism becomes to us, as it does to all true science, 
the continuity, the omnipresence, of the divine method ; 
supernaturalism becomes to us, as it does to all reverent, 
loving faith, the inner force of the natural, unfolding in 
visible forms the invisible things of the spirit. We are 
patient with dogma, because many men are standing 
upon it, and we too in our own way ; we are thankful 
for pietism, because even in its more spasmodic moods 
it is still an experience and expression of life. But we 
.wait on the efforts and aspirations of all good men, as 
they accumulate the conditions of that sound and per- 
vasive spirituality which is to unite the earth under us 
and the heavens over us, according to the mind of God, 
into the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus is nothing destroyed, 
but all things are fulfilled. 

The individual life can only express itself in terms of 
the common life, for this is the field of the affections ; the 
common life can only disclose its wealth in the wealth of 
the individual, for the individual is the unit in all its 
enumerations. Each w^aits on all, and all wait on each. 
Love reveals itself to love alone. The future is obscure 
to us, because we have not yet reached the spiritual points 
of overlook. We move forward under a wide naturalism, 
implanted in our own constitution, the constitution of 
society, and in the Divine Mind. This maps for us the 
otherwise unexplored path. The desire reverently and 
obediently to wait on each fresh revelation in this up- 
ward-tending way is the temper of the New Theology. 



SPIRITUALISM. 217 

It breaks only with that scheme of theology which so 
interpenetrates our relations to God with supernatural- 
ism as to obscure for us human character, the laws of 
spiritual growth, the grace of Christ, and the meaning 
of salvation. 



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Rev. EDWARD T. BARTLETT, UD., 
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